BAND 3 Liminal Semiotics: Boundary Phenomena in Romanticism 9783050064536, 9783050059563

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Liminal Semiotics

WeltLiteraturen World Literatures Band 3 Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien

Herausgegeben von Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Stefan Keppler-Tasaki und Joachim Küpper Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Nicholas Boyle (University of Cambridge), Elisabeth Bronfen (Universität Zürich), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University), Renate Lachmann (Universität Konstanz), Kenichi Mishima (Osaka University), Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (EHESS Paris), Janet A. Walker (Rutgers University), David Wellbery (University of Chicago), Christopher Young (University of Cambridge)

Melanie Maria Lörke

Liminal Semiotics Boundary Phenomena in Romanticism

Akademie Verlag

Dissertationsschrift, Freie Universität Berlin, 2011. Die Entstehung dieser Arbeit wurde gefördert durch ein Stipendium der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft im Rahmen der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien an der Freien Universität Berlin.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. © Akademie Verlag GmbH, Berlin 2013 Ein Wissenschaftsverlag der Oldenbourg Gruppe. www.akademie-verlag.de Das Werk einschließlich aller Abbildungen ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Bearbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Einbandgestaltung: hauser lacour, unter Verwendung der Typus orbis terrarum (Weltkarte des Abraham Ortelius). Kupferstich, koloriert, 1571. akg-images. Druck & Bindung: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza Dieses Papier ist alterungsbeständig nach DIN/ISO 9706. ISBN 978-3-05-005956-3 eISBN 978-3-05-006453-6

Contents

Acknowledgments .................................................................................................

9

Introduction ............................................................................................................. 11 n Romanticisms – n 1 ........................................................................................... 11 Postmodernist Romanticism or Romantic Postmodernism? ................................. 21 Delimiting ............................................................................................................. 27

1. Boundaries ......................................................................................................... 31 Three Romantic examples .................................................................................... 31 Dyadic approaches ................................................................................................ 34 Towards triadic models: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce .................. 39

2. Magic Words? The Semiotics of Romanticism .......................................... 53 Searching for magic signs ..................................................................................... 53 Inspiration from the enemy: Locke, Condillac, Herder ........................................ 57 Locke’s arbitrary sign – Condillac: colliding models of language origin – Herder: towards Romantic theories of language origin

Natural wonders or wild language games ............................................................. 69 August Wilhelm Schlegel: poetic language origins – Blake’s poetry as theory of language origin – Novalis: between iconicity and arbitrariness – Coleridge: natural language as creative language – Shelley: the unacknowledged legislator as solution? – Emerson: the dissolution of the poet

Romantic tensions today: between signification and subjectification .................. 94

3. Semiotic Boundaries ........................................................................................ 105 Expressions of semiotic a-limitation ..................................................................... 105 Moby-Dick: signs on men and whales .................................................................. 106 Queequeg – Ahab and Ishmael – The whale – Naming and reading: Adamic language and “The Doubloon”

Contents

6

Uncanny ekphrasis: pictures of whales and demons ............................................. 118 Moby-Dick: dark paintings – Melmoth: the portrait becomes alive – Das Marmorbild: becoming-sign

Transgressive intertexts ........................................................................................ 130 Moby-Dick: introducing the whale as intertextual fragment – Das Marmorbild: Venus as intertext – Moby-Dick: Ahab as assemblage – Melmoth: Gothic intertexts and the devil

Schizonarration: Ishmael and the boundaries of narration .................................... 139 The retreat of the signified: embedded narratives.................................................. 145 Moby-Dick: the Town-Ho-story as problem of narration – Melmoth: searching for the devil

Whose world is this? From story to discourse and back ....................................... 154 Moby-Dick: Ishmael between the worlds – Der goldne Topf: Dresden or Atlantis?

Summary and Ishmael’s rhizomatic book ............................................................. 163

4. Theory Plateau on Semiotic A-limitation .................................................... 169 Single signs: Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” ............................................................. Intertextuality ........................................................................................................ Ekphrasis as intermedial phenomenon .................................................................. Narrative I: possible worlds .................................................................................. Narrative II: the discourse level ............................................................................

169 171 174 177 180

5. Subject Boundaries ........................................................................................... 183 Becoming-sign: the effects of liminal semiotics on the subject ............................ 183 The transgressive subject in Poe: lost in the crowd and afraid of the merge ........ 185 The narrator at the boundary – The face in the crowd – The desire to merge with the “man of the crowd”

The transcendent subject: becoming-woman, becoming-plant, becoming-poet ... 192 Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s point of access – A glimpse of becoming-woman: Heinrich’s dream of the blue flower – Heinrich’s journey towards becoming – A semiotic union of desire: Heinrich and Mathilde – Heinrich’s becoming-animal, -flower, -stone, -star

The dissolved but unified subject: becoming-Jerusalem ...................................... 208 Between transcendence and transgression – Between death and life: Albion – Between spectres and emanations: the anti-Oedipal family – Between selfhood and self-annihilation

Between Poe, Novalis, and Blake ......................................................................... 223

Contents

7

6. Theory Plateau on Subject A-limitation ...................................................... 227 What is a subject? An introduction through Walt Whitman ................................. The subject as part of larger systems: myth and nature in “Mondnacht” ............. Creating the self in Idealism ................................................................................. The Romantic subject and its becomings .............................................................. Becoming-sign and becoming-posthuman ............................................................

227 230 233 236 241

7. Spatial Boundaries ............................................................................................ 245 From sign to subject to space: Jerusalem’s journey .............................................. 245 Entering the book – Blake’s mode of production and the poetics of Jerusalem – Blake and Deleuze: radicle- and rhizome-books

Changing spaces: the Taugenichts on the threshold .............................................. 252 The Taugenichts as settler, migrant, and nomad – The Taugenichts between smooth and striated space – The Taugenichts’s strategies of re-imparting smooth space

Approaching limits: Charlotte Smith’s visions of the sea ..................................... 265 Land and sea as ambiguous spaces – Excursion to the former margins of the Romantic canon: another perspective on becoming-woman – Death, sea, and woman – The sea as striated space of tourism and smooth space of poetry

Multiplicity as the final frontier: Walt Whitman’s American landscape .............. 287 The cosmos as smooth space: Barbauld and Whitman – Whitman’s merging with the sea – Whitman’s prairie as conceptual smooth space – Death, the city, and multiplicity – The a-signifying semiotics of Leaves of Grass

8. Theory Plateau on Spatial A-limitation ....................................................... 313 Binary boundaries and the limit ............................................................................ Transgression and heterotopia .............................................................................. Rhizomes .............................................................................................................. The smooth and the striated ..................................................................................

313 316 318 321

9. In Place of a Conclusion ................................................................................. 329 Fragmented and convulsive: Whitman, Deleuze, and the limit ............................ 329 Following Whitman into Modernism .................................................................... 334 House of Leaves as an example of Postmodernist a-limitation ............................. 338

Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 343

Acknowledgments

In their “Introduction” to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write, “Since each of us was several [when writing Anti-Oedipus], there was already quite a crowd.” In a very pragmatic way, this is also true of the author of this book. Numerous people and institutions assisted in the composition of this book and made me several. The idea of writing about the crossing or elimination of boundaries first arose during my time at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. My academic teachers supported my project and encouraged me to pursue a comparative approach. I am grateful to the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the the Freie Universität Berlin for the generous DFG scholarship and the stimulating atmosphere that made Berlin my second academic home and, at the same time, allowed me to leave this home occasionally to attend international conferences and workshops. The valuable experiences made in Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom would not have been possible without the substantial funding from and organizational support of the Friedrich Schlegel School. My deepest acknowledgments are due to my supervisor Professor Russell WestPavlov and my mentor Professor Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, both of whom were attentive readers and inspirational advisors. I profited from their expertise and their support as an academic and as a person. I would also like to thank the examination board for their time and the interesting discussion they generated. The Friedrich Schlegel School with its many colloquia, seminars, guest lecturers, fellows, and ad-hoc reading groups provided a motivating environment that allowed for ideas to be tested and hypotheses to be discussed. I benefited immensely from the academic community at the Freie Universität, particularly from the support and advice so freely given by Professor Sabine Schülting, Professor Cordula Lemke, and Professor Elisabeth K. Paefgen, whose doors were always open to me and my questions concerning all conceivable areas of academia. Among the many fellows who frequented the Friedrich Schlegel School and contributed to the development of my thesis in colloquia and in one-on-one sessions I would like to highlight Professor Gabriele Schwab, whose monograph on Entgrenzung in Modernist literature inspired my own work. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate students who, more often than not, asked the crucial question that enabled me to take my work to the next level. They were complemented by the graduate students of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

10

Acknowledgments

The support of the Foundation enabled me not only to take part in various workshops, but above all offered yet another group of fellow academics that enlarged my horizon in many ways. I also owe many thanks to the University of Cambridge for allowing me to become a member of its community. Gonville and Caius College and the Department of German and Dutch welcomed me into their homes, and I gained new insights into my work through supervision by various members of the Department, including Professor Nicholas Boyle. My special thanks go to Professor Andrew J. Webber and Dr Kathleen M. Wheeler, who both read and commented on my work extensively and surprised me with their kind and warm professionalism. I am also indebted to the many readers and proof-readers of the manuscript at its various stages. My final thanks are due to those people without whom this book would not have been possible. I am grateful to old friends, who encouraged me all along the way, and new friends, who enriched my life. My husband, who married me knowing that I was about to start writing a thesis and who was always the first to share and discuss my ideas, has been my greatest source of strength during the last three years. He made me one and several at the same time. Finally, I owe especial thanks to my parents, who have always supported and encouraged me in every possible way. To them I would like to dedicate this book.

Introduction

n Romanticisms – 1 This book is rhizomorphous. It comprises different plateaus on different aspects of the Romantic boundary phenomena or ‘a-limitation’. Each plateau connects to the others in the same way that ‘a-limitation’ consists of three interdependent dimensions (sign, subject, and space) which can be considered separately, but always also occur in the other two dimensions. This book has many possible entry points and several ways of analyzing ‘a-limitation’-phenomena. The chapters/plateaus can be read in whichever order the reader pleases – the only exception is the introductory chapter on the concept of ‘a-limitation’ which should be read first. Using this concept, I will attempt to grow bulbs and tubers as Deleuze and Guattari propose in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, which I read as a poetic program on (literary and scholarly) writing.1 I will argue that the rhizomorphous (or, to name related concepts from A Thousand Plateaus, the nomadic, the smooth, the deterritorialized, the molecular, and the body without organs) is so inherently Romantic that it can be used to analyze Romantic boundary phenomena. Deleuze and Guattari emphatically call for wild growth: “Write to the nth power, the n – 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point!”2 The rhizome is their image for the wild and heterogeneous and the root/tree symbolizes hierarchically ordered structures. They are not, however, a mutually exclusive dichotomy, or a binary. They include each other: “There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. […] A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch”.3 The rhizome is an attempt to solve the deadlock of Western thinking – a deadlock the Romantics also sought to solve, though through po1 2 3

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 3–28. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 16.

12

Introduction

etry. As Friedrich Schlegel writes in Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation about Poetry): “Die Poesie ist so tief in dem Menschen gewurzelt, daß sie auch unter den ungünstigsten Umständen immer noch zu Zeiten wild wächst”4 (Poetry is rooted so deeply inside the human being that at times it can grow wildly even under the most unfavorable of circumstances). There is an obvious difference in the choice of metaphor: Schlegel does not mind roots or trees, while Deleuze and Guattari call for their end: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics”.5 The essence of the thought, however, is the same: revolutionary, shifting away from order and the state6 towards chaos: “Aber die höchste Schönheit, ja die höchste Ordnung ist denn doch nur die des Chaos…”7 (But the greatest beauty, the greatest order even, is that of chaos after all…), writes Schlegel. Both the Romantics and Deleuze and Guattari are aware that their radical poetics represent an ambitious goal to achieve. In his celebration of the poet as an unconventional crosser of boundaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson admits: “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.”8 That is why there is no pure rhizome, but only mixed forms and inbetweens. The rhizome (and the concepts connected to it) is Deleuze and Guattari’s regulative idea, their form of a Postmodernist wish for transcendence. The same tension that defines every major Romantic concept is inherent in their poetics: progressive Universalpoesie, irony, the fragment, Romantic subjectivity, and, as I will show, also Romantic semiotics and Romantic space. This tension is between the one and the many, the universal and the individual, the nation and the person, between meaning and endless deferral of the signified, between wholeness and fragmentation. In Romantic philosophy, this tension often seems to be resolved by synthesis, but it still remains intact in the way boundaries and their crossings are depicted in literary texts. There is an ongoing process in Deleuze and Guattari’s poetics that leads to an infinite oscillation between, and mixture of, binary oppositions. Thus both Romantic ‘alimitation’ and its postmodern counterpart are determined by the dissolution of 4

5 6

7 8

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005) 204. I use easily accessible editions of primary texts where possible. Where this is not possible, I use authoritative and annotated standard editions. The translations are my own unless indicated otherwise. They are of no aesthetic value since they only serve to aid the Englishspeaking reader. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17. “Wir müssen also auch über den Staat hinaus!” (We must therefore go beyond the state) says the Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. This is, of course, not true for every Romantic phase and thinker. I will, however, show that there are traces of these poetics in the ‘a-limitation’ phenomena in texts by conservative Romantics. Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften, 191. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York and London: Norton, 2001) 195.

n Romanticisms – 1

13

dichotomies into triads. Despite all these similarities, which will be explored in more depth in the following section, there are differences, too. Romanticism’s triadic schemes are teleological: they envisage reaching a final limit (transcendence, paradise, or synthesis) and the – alleged – integration of the one into the whole/many. This philosophy, which Deleuze and Guattari express with the formula n + 1 (the one is added to the multiple), will be queried in the analysis of the literary texts and their boundary crossings. The ideal rhizome (or the rhizome as regulative idea) is represented by the formula n – 1: “Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write n – 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome.”9 A rhizome can be many things: tubers and bulbs of plants or packs of animals, as long as it is diverse, multiple, heterogeneous, asignifying and asubjectifying, and comprises many entry ways. A rhizome-book also has to have these qualities, all of which can also be identified in Romanticism. A rhizome-book is therefore also a Romantic book. Since this book is an academic book, or a cultural book, it “is already a tracing”,10 which means that it refers to other texts, traces lines of thought and ideas, and adheres to certain conventions. And yet it is also a rhizomorphous Romantic book that engages emphatically with Romantic boundary crossing by continuing in the critical tradition of Romantic and Postmodernist ‘a-limitation’. The endurance of Romantic style in a critical piece on Romanticism is a dangerous approach. Writing a Romantic thesis seems to intertwine the object of the study and its analysis. Jerome J. McGann would probably reject this practice as the “uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s self-representations”.11 These self-representations are known tendencies of Romanticism. “One of the basic illusions of Romantic Ideology is that only a poet and his works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by ‘the world’ of politics and money”,12 writes McGann. There is support for this thesis throughout all three Romanticisms explored in this study (German, English, and American), but there are also limitations, exceptions, and contrary implications. The quotation from Emerson’s The Poet (and a discussion of Romantic semiotics in chapter 2) shows that McGann’s allegation is not universally true and that perhaps the concept of Romantic ideology itself should be questioned. Its effects are as dangerous as the academic dilemma it addresses. McGann’s idea of Romantic ideology has led to a fear of Romanticism: “To write on Romanticism, it seems, is necessarily to become unhappily

9 10 11 12

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7. Ibid., 26. Deleuze and Guattari contest that their concepts are lines and that they lay no claim to being scientific (25). Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 1. Ibid., 13.

14

Introduction

Romantic oneself”,13 writes Justin Clemens in the tradition of many scholars who have noted the problem.14 The emphatic use of the term ‘Romantic’, as in Romantic semiotics or Romantic ‘alimitation’, can give the impression of an immersion into Romanticism and an acceptance of Romantic ideas. Naturally, this goes against the very essence of McGann’s study: “Consequently, this book requests to be read at all times with a double awareness: of the actual differentials – political, economic, ideological – which separate the Romantic Period from our own, as well as of the persistent illusions that these differentials do not exist.”15 It would probably be equally polemical to counter this argument with Deleuze and Guattari: “Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.”16 In this introduction, I intend to show that Romantic literature as assemblage enlarges into a rhizomorphous structure: the rhizome of Romanticism, and that this rhizome has many off-shoots leading into Modernism, Postmodernism and contemporary theory. Thus there is continuity between Romanticism and today. To deny this continuity means to cut off the wild growth of ideas and to create a historically ordered tree: an artificially grown order. I will try to show that a self-reflexive terminological practice and Deleuzian thinking are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the oscillation between safe (historically grounded) territory and conceptual lines of flight is a very Romantic/Deleuzian way of thinking. In this spirit, I would like to cross the boundary into Romanticism, re-emerge, and reflect on Romanticism protected by a new boundary. In short, to become Romantic and un-Romantic by turns while writing about Romanticism and enjoying it. Of course, this movement in itself is a triadic Romantic concept. There might be no escape from Romanticism – only new boundaries to cross. Despite the fact that McGann is caught in his own ideological net of revolutionary Marxist thinking17 while at the same time requesting critical distance, his ideas are valuable. Of course, the danger of the conflation between subject and object (a Romantic problem itself) exists in a general tendency to turn towards unity. In this regard, McGann and Deleuze and Guattari exhibit philosophical similarities in their regard for difference. Deleuzian difference as multiplicity expressed in the formula n – 1 applied to Romanticism and Romantic scholarship implies that there is not just one Romanticism (the Romanticism that celebrates the poet and retreats into nature as a 13 14

15 16 17

Justin Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institutions, Aesthetics, Nihilism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 11. Despite McGann’s influential text, not all of Anglo-American academia considers being a Romantic critic a scholarly crime: Azade Seyhan for example comments that her own writing remains, “in the Romantic spirit which it has attempted to represent, a fragment”. Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents. The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992) 22. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 13f. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5. His privileging of Shelley is, after all, based on common ideological ground.

n Romanticisms – 1

15

source for stability),18 but many, perhaps even ‘n Romanticisms - 1’. This means that Romanticism itself is a rhizome (and not a root structure). Even calling the covered period or the discussed aesthetic program Romanticism is as dangerous as writing in its spirit. First of all, a differentiation between three distinct national literatures seems to be necessary. Rüdiger Safranski’s widely acclaimed 2007 publication Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre (Romanticism. A German Affair) bears the appeal to restrict Romanticism to one nation in its title.19 I attempt to demonstrate that Romanticism is not solely a German affair, but an English and American affair, too. It is part of what Goethe calls “Weltliteratur” (world literature).20 The influence of German Romanticism on American Romanticism via English Romanticism and the direct influence of German Romanticism on American Romanticism serve as a means to justify the broad range of texts discussed in the following chapters, but the description of the movements themselves is not the object of this study. Behind the alleged universality of ‘a-limitation’ lies this interdependence that becomes apparent through the study of the texts, but also through the fact that some of their authors actually met.21 They went down actual lines intersecting with each other, producing new off-shoots of ideas. Thus, ‘a-limitation’ is not an accidental phenomenon. On the one hand, it originates from an early form of the globalization of ideas. On the other hand, it is a result of parallel epistemological changes which cannot be attributed to direct influence alone. If Romanticism resembles a rhizome, it consists of different national nodules forming connections with each other and allowing for different structures to emerge. From the perspective of American Studies, American Romanticism or the American Renaissance is sometimes seen as “the final phase of a movement that begins with European Romanticism”.22 Certainly, later texts of American Romanticism distance themselves from 18 19

20

21

22

These are elements of Romantic ideology. The idea of difference actually shows that Romantic ideology is, if applied universally, as much a construct as the object that it criticizes. Safranski does not claim Romanticism exclusively for Germany, but considers Romanticism in Germany to have particular qualities. “Es ist nicht nur ein deutsches Phänomen [das Romantische], aber es hat in Deutschland eine besondere Ausprägung erfahren, so sehr, daß man im Ausland bisweilen die deutsche Kultur mit Romantik und dem Romantischen gleichsetzt.” (Romanticism is not an exclusively German phenomenon, but its German version has certain pecularities that, from an international point of view, led to an identification of German culture with Romanticism.) Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: eine deutsche Affäre (München: Hanser, 2007) 12. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Fritz Bergemann (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: Insel, 2000) 211. I do not intend to appropriate Goethe for rhizomorphous thinking, but in 1827 he already stated that the period of national literature was over. The present study reflects Goethe’s sentiment to speed up the perception of Romanticism as world literature. See, for example, René Wellek, Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) 9ff. Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) xii.

16

Introduction

earlier Romantic notions and represent a culmination of self-reflexivity.The transition into Modernist writing begins with Whitman and Melville. To a certain degree this is also reflected in the way boundary phenomena find different ways of expression. A concept that originated in European thought (the semiotic ideas of German Romantics such as Schlegel and Novalis) unfolds its potential in later American texts. Yet there are a-chronological occurrences of ‘a-limitation’ as well. To prove this point, ostensibly incompatible texts are juxtaposed and cross-read. Here, the rhizomorphous nature of Romanticism is respected. The unusual combinations (for example Poe, Novalis, and Blake in chapter 5) reveal important differences but also functional commonalities that justify using a single term for the boundary phenomenon in question. Another attempt to create an arborescent Romanticism is the ordering of Romanticism into branches, twigs, and trunks according to the social/literary sets its authors belonged to. All three Romanticisms were heterogeneous movements that are conventionally subdivided into different strands, schools, movements, phases, and ideologies.23 No more do Novalis and Eichendorff belong to the same kind of Romanticism than do Wordsworth and Shelley or Emerson and Melville. One engages in philosophical speculation, the other in religious song. One escapes into nature, the other rebels against conventions. One is an optimistic idealist, the other focuses on the dark side of the human soul. To reiterate, this study does not ignore the differences between the interior boundaries within Romanticism, but it does not adhere to the artificial tree of Romantic schools either, as the juxtaposition of Eichendorff with Melville and Maturin in chapter 3 shows. Again, this is a question of difference, or multiplicity, and unity. Ever since Lovejoy’s article “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”,24 privileging unity over plurality has been a taboo – one that should not entirely be parted with, particularly when considering the Postmodernist theories that are juxtaposed with Romanticism in this study. However, following René Wellek’s attempt to refute Lovejoy’s argument,25 the unity of Romanticism has also found its supporters. German scholarship 23

24

25

On the development of the differentiation between phases of German Romanticism see the introduction to Bernd Auerochs and Dirk von Petersdorff, eds., Einheit der Romantik? Zur Transformation frühromantischer Konzepte im 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009) 7– 12. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” English Romantic Poets. Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M.H. Abrams, 2nd ed. (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 3–23. See René Wellek, “Romanticism Re-examined,” Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1968) 107–33. In later articles, Wellek also points out differences within Romanticism. See chapter 1 in Wellek, Confrontations 3–33. Since it is not the aim of this study to debate the concept of Romanticism as such, the famous debate between Lovejoy and Wellek is not recounted in detail. Many critics have ably done so. See for example Frances Ferguson, “On the Numbers of Romanticisms,” ELH 58.2 (1991): 471–98. And Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory 5–8. Both studies include McGann in their

n Romanticisms – 1

17

engages in a similar debate. In his literary history, Gerhard Schulz claims that there is no Romanticism: “Es gibt keine Romantik als nach einem ästhetischen Programm oder Grundgesetz ablaufende Periode, und es gibt erst recht keine Romantiker.”26 (Romanticism does not exist in the sense of an aesthetic program or a period that progresses according to one fundamental principle; and there are certainly no Romantics.) This position has its supporters, but – as is the case with English Romanticism – instigates debates about the heterogeneity of Romanticism rather than effecting the abolition of the concept or the term. Thus, German scholarship distinguishes different phases and problematizes the boundaries of the epoch, but there is a tentative consensus to adhere to a Gesamtromantik determined by both continuities and discontinuities.27 One example of the different views on the unity of Romanticism and the allocation of different authors to phases of Romanticism is Joseph von Eichendorff who is generally read as the epitome of high or middle Romanticism. Ludwig Stockinger argues that Eichendorff’s late texts demonstrate continuity between the early speculative, or philosophical, phase of Romanticism through their intertextual references. He understands Romanticism as a Strömung (current) within the Goethezeit.28 Friedrich Sengle, on the other hand, explores the boundary dynamics of Eichendorff and the German period of Biedermeier.29 Having experienced disillusionment with the Napoleonic Wars, he shares a distrust of the demonic self with other poets of this period (Droste, Gotthelf, and Stifter). This shows how fluid the boundaries within the sphere of Romanticism are and that a single author can be considered from a number of perspectives. There is no root-tree of Romanticism where the canonical authors provide a High-Romanticismtrunk and others stretch in branches and twigs to the end of the period. Instead, an author such as Eichendorff can take different positions, grow different offshoots into the directions of early philosophical Romanticism or late religious Romanticism and Biedermeier.

26

27 28

29

discussion. Clemens also addresses problems of subject matter, periodization, and methodology in more depth than necessary for my purposes. The main issue at stake in Clemens is the relation between Romanticism and Postmodernism that I discuss in the next section. Gerhard Schulz, Das Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution: 1789–1806. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Helmut de Boor and Richard Newald (München: Beck, 1983) 76. Schulz himself qualifies this strong thesis, stating that there are different individual and collective strands or schools, or Romanticisms. Auerochs and Petersdorff, eds., Einheit der Romantik?, 8f. See Ludwig Stockinger, “Die ganze Romantik oder partielle Romantiken,” Einheit der Romantik? Zur Transformation frühromantischer Konzepte im 19. Jahrhundert, eds. Bernd Auerochs and Dirk von Petersdorff (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009) 21–42. See Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848. Vol.1 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971) 248f.

18

Introduction

A number of recent studies naturally combine texts from different phases of Romanticism.30 In the present study, texts from the different Romanticisms are not only read with each other, but also against each other. This is not a chronological study. With the exception of parts of chapter 2, texts that were written almost one hundred years apart are scrutinized for the same mechanisms. The entry points of the chapters are chosen for different reasons: sometimes prototypical texts introduce a certain aspect of ‘a-limitation’ (for example Moby-Dick in chapter 3); sometimes the texts exemplify different modes of ‘a-limitation’ (for example transgression in Poe, transcendence in Novalis, dissolution in Blake in chapter 5); or the texts mirror an increase in the strength of ‘alimitation’ (from Eichendorff to Smith to Whitman in chapter 7). This reading practice reveals nodules shared by very different Romantic texts. Such a reading could imply a unity underlined by the usage of the term ‘Romanticism’. Lovejoy already suggests that it is an empty signifier. This idea is renewed by McGann and instigates another debate in the 1980s and 1990s. As Frances Ferguson, who criticizes McGann, points out, the problem lies in the relation between the individual and their age, or between difference and unity.31 While the signifier itself may appear emptied of its actual signified (what is Romanticism?), its connotations are politicized. At this point it becomes apparent that the debate surrounding the meaning of Romanticism bears resemblances to Romantic semiotics: Can ‘Romanticism’ function as the magic word that unlocks meaning, or is it just a sign in a process of unlimited semiosis that leads from one Romanticism to the next? What, then, is at stake – a period, a paradigm, a poetic program, or a canon of poets and their ideas? Across the different scholarly traditions there seems to be tentative agreement that the adjective ‘Romantic’ refers to a paradigm, while Romanticism is a literary period.32 Thus, un-Romantic writers can write during Romanticism and Romantic writers during Modernism. This inevitably leads to questions of inclusion and exclusion: Who is a Romantic? Is Eichendorff, as suggested by the positions discussed above, a high Romantic, or is he situated at the boundary to Biedermeier? Can Blake be included, or is he a pre-Romantic? Is Whitman still a Romantic, or is he already a Modernist – or should one better adhere to the idea of the American Renaissance? How should the ideological framework attached to this term be treated?33 Does John Clare’s 30

31 32

33

One example is Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry, which begins with John Clare, moves on to Walt Whitman and then straight to the contemporary poet John Ashbery. See Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). See Ferguson, “On the Numbers of Romanticisms,” 478. Safranski writes: “Die Romantik ist eine Epoche. Das Romantische eine Geisteshaltung, die nicht auf eine Epoche beschränkt ist. Sie hat in der Epoche der Romantik ihren vollkommenen Ausdruck gefunden, ist aber nicht darauf beschränkt; das Romantische gibt es bis heute.” Safranski, Romantik 12. On trends and debates surrounding the periodization and canonization of the American Renaissance see Cecelia Tichi, “American Literary Studies to the Civil War,” Redrawing the Boundaries. The

n Romanticisms – 1

19

nature poetry belong to the canon? Are the numerous women writers, who were only recently discovered by criticism, Romantic, or do they change the very notion of the Romantic? How does their idea of the mind or the sublime challenge long established catch phrases used to describe Romanticism in every classroom? This study privileges neither the center nor the margin of either the Romantic period or the Romantic paradigm. Instead, it acknowledges the canon’s fuzzy boundaries, highlights the differences between texts and their boundary phenomena.34 It is not the aim of this study to redefine Romantic or Romanticism, or to answer the questions above, but to describe, analyze, and attempt to explain the occurrence of certain boundary phenomena. The course of this examination, however, touches the boundaries of Romanticism as a period and as a paradigm when contacts between Romanticism and Postmodernism or Modernism take place. Hence Romanticism is not the magic word. As chapter 2 shows, magic words start losing their power during Romanticism itself.35 The proliferation of endless possibilities of meaning counteracts the belief in magic words. Criticism of the term ‘Romanticism’ suggests two things: on the one hand, a multiplicity of possibilities that culminates in the negation of the signifier itself (the period formerly known as Romanticism); and, on the other hand, the certainty with which the term is used on the title pages of numerous recent studies, anthologies, and not to mention in the classrooms of universities in Germany, Great Britain, and America. If one uses ‘Romanticism’ as a sign in the sense of the progressive Universalpoesie – as a sign that is universal and yet open and unfinished – one may hope to negotiate unity and diversity. In this sense, n Romanticisms–1, the Romantic rhizome, does not unlock a hidden unity or meaning, but offers multiple possibilities of connecting different Romanticisms with each other. In his study The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory Justin Clemens calls Romanticism “an involuted sequence of repetitions-with-differences”.36 I would like to follow his definition because it highlights a central issue pointing to the imbrication of Romanticism and ‘a-limitation’. To negotiate between unity, totality, the absolute and multiplicity, diversity, individuality is part of the phenomenon of ‘a-limitation’, but not its only trait. Chapter 3, on Ishmael’s attempt to write a unified book that keeps transforming into a rhizomatic structure, demonstrates this semiotically. Chapter 5 scrutinizes Blake’s concept of subject dissolution between the unification with Jesus and the

34

35

36

Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992) 209–31. One example that illustrates the complicated situation between macro- and micro-levels of Romanticism and the surrounding scholarship concerns Goethe. English scholarship naturally counts Goethe among the Romantics. Goethe himself, however, rejected Romanticism as a “sick” movement conceding only that a few of his texts might bear affinities to Romanticism. Clemens gives this thought a nice twist. Since Romanticism chiefly addresses the problem of undecidability and indiscernibility and one cannot possible decide what ‘Romanticism’ really means, one is inevitably Romantic. Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, 16. Ibid., xiii.

20

Introduction

proliferation of multiple selves and thus treats the problem from a philosophical perspective. Finally, Whitman’s oscillation between plures and unum, discussed in chapter 7, approaches the dialectics from a spatial point of view. The short excerpt of themes shows that ‘a-limitation’ can be read in context with other concepts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Romantic irony or the sublime. There might be resemblances to these concepts, but ‘a-limitation’ is not congruent with them. My point of entry to this phenomenon is through semiotics.37 That is why chapter 2 delineates what I would like to call the liminal semiotics of Romanticism. It serves as one possible entry point to a variety of boundary phenomena. The negotiation of two ways of seeing the world entails the management of language, subjectivity, and space that is determined by 37

Many key texts and ideas contribute to the notion of ‘a-limitation’ or are related to it. I mentioned Schlegel’s progressive Universalpoesie, fragments, and irony, but the Gothic or dark side of Romanticism also presents us with the Doppelgänger, the Faustian transgressor, and ideas of the monstrous. Not all of these concepts are discussed in the following analyses of texts, but it should be kept in mind that they produce discourses that belong to the larger concept of ‘a-limitation’. Irony, for example, as Livingston (drawing on Anne K. Mellor and Paul de Man) describes it is “an ongoing oscillation between extremes”. Ira Livingston, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity, Theory out of Bounds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 93. Certainly, the interdependence of sign, subject, and space that is further elaborated in the introductory chapter on “Boundaries” is one that can also be attested to the experience of the sublime. German and English treatises on the sublime written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are quite different. Kant, Schiller, Burke, and Baillie, to name only the most influential ones, have distinct conceptions of the sublime. I will not discuss or compare them in detail here, but they are all concerned with the subject’s reaction to the sublime (which can be a spatial phenomenon) and its aesthetic implications and thus impact on all three dimensions of ‘a-limitation’, namely the loss of boundaries. The discourses on the sublime certainly contribute to Romantic ‘a-limitation’, as do discourses on subjectivity or language theory, but they are not congruent with the concept of Romantic ‘a-limitation’. Each Romantic writer presents us with different theoretical or poetic texts on or of the sublime. For example, Coleridge’s feeling of nothingness as a result of a sublime experience (a Gothic cathedral) is called the ‘romantic sublime’ by Thomas Weiskel. Weiskel also discusses the sublime from a semiotic point of view. See Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). His approach acknowledges the impossibility of reducing the sublime to a semiotic model. Weiskel and other scholars also stress the psychological implications of the sublime. ‘A-limitation’ is a semiotic concept that only functions in relation to subjectivity and space – categories equally involved in the sublime. The ethical implications of ‘a-limitation’ are, however, based on the negation of the male sublime and instead lead to questions about our specific attitude towards our environment. Peter de Bolla focuses on the production of the autonomous subject through a discourse of the sublime and of debt. See Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Frances Ferguson’s study compares Kant and Burke with each other (formalist idealism versus empiricism). She also discusses the link between the sublime experience and language, namely the impossibility of representing experience, which she considers consistent with deconstruction (9). Recent accounts of the sublime deal with the linguistic problem of “locating a finite individual in relation to the infinite arbitrary system of language” (15). Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Postmodernist Romanticism or Romantic Postmodernism?

21

boundaries, their crossing and re-crossing. It is a problem that is not solved in Romanticism, Modernism, or Postmodernism. It could be seen as a Romantic problem that grows off-shoots into all subsequent literary periods. To examine its scope critically and from a historical perspective, a point of reference is needed. Choosing this point of reference free of ideological implications is impossible. Therefore I would like to suggest choosing it on the basis of continuity and change38 – and this is where Deleuze and Guattari become important as an off-shoot of rhizomorphous Romanticism.

Postmodernist Romanticism or Romantic Postmodernism? Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus will function as a reference text for Romantic ‘a-limitation’ for three reasons. First, A Thousand Plateaus exemplifies the relationship between Romanticism and Postmodernism as kindred movements. Second, Deleuze and Guattari use Romantic texts to illustrate their Postmodernist theories and think in a Romantic way themselves. Third, A Thousand Plateaus contains a theory of ‘a-limitation’. By choosing a Postmodernist reference text that can provide terms for analysis, I hope to create distance between my criticism and the texts themselves. At the same time, I build on the existing continuity of direct textual references and indirect theoretical affinities which prevents the arbitrary and anachronistic imposition of theory on Romantic texts. The combination of Postmodernist or Poststructuralist theory with Romantic texts is not new. In the “Introduction” to the 1999 essay collection Romanticism and Postmodernism Edward Larrissy refers to the “genetic thesis about the persistence of Romanticism in the present”.39 Since Romantic tensions are still unresolved and Romantic notions continue to inform Postmodernist thinking, Postmodernist thinking is bound to turn to Romantic texts for analysis. A record of scholarship located in Postmodernist theory exists for each of the authors discussed in the present study. Some38

39

The continuity in Romanticism is not only affirmed by the teaching canon, but also by scholars like Anne K. Mellor. In her study on Romanticism and gender Mellor looks at the difference between previously established masculine Romanticism and a rediscovered feminine Romanticism. She ponders abandoning the term altogether (perhaps using a tedious abbreviation such as “LEEN Lit” for “Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Literature”) (211). However, on the basis of pragmatic and theoretical considerations, she comes to the conclusion that further specifications (such as masculine or feminine) are helpful, but there is an overall continuity that justifies the usage of the term for women writers as well (imagination, fictive, ideal, utopian, revolutionary). See Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 209–12. Livingston attributes a “metastability” to Romanticism. This study pursues the counter-argument and reaffirms Romanticism as becoming in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming has stable moments as well; one of them is the creation of the subject. Cf. Livingston, Arrow of Chaos, 12. Edward Larrissy, “Introduction,” Romanticism and Postmodernism, ed. Edward Larrissy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 1.

22

Introduction

times Postmodernist thinkers themselves turn to Romantic texts as happened in the notorious debate on Poe’s Purloined Letter.40 The ensuing poststructuralist and deconstructionist readings and their subsequent revisions are already part of institutional memory, whilst also figuring in an ongoing debate.41 Romanticism experiences all paradigm shifts and ‘turns’ because of its immense potential and its historically liminal position in what Koselleck calls Sattelzeit – the time when the most profound changes took place.42 The early phase of German Romanticism, the Frühromantik, with its discussion of aesthetics all but cries for an engagement with theory and is, unsurprisingly, often read in conjunction with Derrida.43 Similar cross-readings take place in studies of the English Romantics and in comparative studies.44 Whitman’s work seems to lend itself to studies investigating queer sexuality and the body. With the extension of the canon, feminist and gender oriented readings focus on women writers.45 And even writers who, at first sight, seem unlikely to offer possibilities for a postmodern reading feature a history of Postmodernist scholarship. Joseph von Eichendorff, the late and allegedly harmless German Romantic, is discovered by Foucauldian discourse analysis in the late 1980s and later by deconstructionist frameworks as well.46 Certain trends or 40

41

42

43 44

45 46

For a reprint of the debate between Lacan and Derrida and the subsequent scholarship see John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe. Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). See Stephen Copley and John Whale, eds., Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 4–6. I would like to follow Christoph Bode’s argument in bringing together Romanticism and Postmodernist theory (in my case Deleuze and Guattari). Bode demonstrates an “elective affinity” (151) between Romanticism and Deconstruction by pointing to their similar ideas about language. See Christoph Bode, “Romanticism and Deconstruction: Distant Relations and Elective Affinities,” Romantic Continuities, eds. Günther Blaicher and Michael Gassenmeier (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1992) 131–59. From the mid-eighteenth century on experiences changed so profoundly that there was a change in the meaning of words as well. See Reinhart Koselleck’s introduction to the first volume of his historical concepts: Reinhart Koselleck, et al., eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Vol. 1. (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972) xv. See, for example, Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdoppelung. Die frühromantische Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987). See, for example, Kathleen Wheeler’s study that reads German and English Romantics for their affinities to John Dewey and Derrida. Kathleen M. Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). For a discussion of similar works see Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, 4. See, for example, Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender; Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). For a Foucauldian reading see Waltraud Wiethölter, “Die Schule der Venus. Ein diskursanalytischer Versuch zu Eichendorffs ‘Marmorbild’,” Eichendorffs Modernität, eds. Michael Kessler and Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1989). Daniel Müller Nielaba reads Eichendorff’s “Wünschelrute” as an infinite deferral of meaning. See Daniel Müller Nielaba, “Vom Bedeuten des Literarischen: verstehen, verschoben – Einige Grundsatzüberlegungen und zwei Exkurse zu Schiller und Eichendorff,” Kultur Nicht Verstehen. Produktives

Postmodernist Romanticism or Romantic Postmodernism?

23

‘turns’ undoubtedly contribute to the wide-spread Postmodernist methodology in literary criticism on Romantic texts, but there is also an affinity between text and theory that justifies such readings as, for example, the history of criticism on William Blake illustrates. A quick glance at the history of scholarship on William Blake’s last illuminated book Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion, which is discussed in chapters 5 and 7, shows how and why the focus of scholarship turns to Postmodernist thinking (though not exclusively, of course). Initially, and for a long time, Jerusalem was read with the concepts of sense and coherence in mind.47This convention produced several ways of explaining and structuring Jerusalem: according to the four ages of man, according to different religions, according to the Four Zoas, or according to biblical history. The structuralist revision of these readings did not impose ideas from the outside, but it, too, looked for consistency.48 The result of these approaches was the formulation of different structures reflecting a lack of narrative progression in Jerusalem, coupled, nevertheless, with an underlying system of coherence. Then critics started to depart from this focus on narrative and plot and turned towards specific readings against the background of theories that – like Blake’s texts – resist the idea of sense and order. Beginning roughly in the late 1980s with a collection of articles on Blake that uses poststructuralist theory, scholarship began to establish the Postmodernist William Blake.49 Robert Essick naturally resorts to Derrida in his analysis of Blake’s language philosophy, Jennifer Davis Michael applies urban theory to Jerusalem, and Mitchell looks at Blake’s previously neglected composite art from the point of view of the pictorial turn in theory.50 In the past two decades, many studies aimed to explain Blake’s

47

48

49 50

Nichtverstehen und Verstehen als Gestaltung, eds. Juerg Albrecht, et al. (Wien and New York: Springer, 2005) 37–52. For a comprehensive overview of the history of Jerusalem criticism consult Essick’s article: Robert N. Essick, “Jerusalem and Blake's Final Works,” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 251–71. For an extensive history, see Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) 12–32. Also see Minna Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem. Structure and Meaning in Poetry and Picture (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982) 13f. Stuart Curran, “The Structure of Jerusalem,” Blake’s Sublime Allegory. Essays on The Four Zoas Milton Jerusalem, eds. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Jr. Wittreich (London and Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). See Nelson Hilton, Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). See Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Jennifer Davis Michael, Blake and the City (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 1994).

24

Introduction

Postmodernity through factors such as an epistemological crisis, whilst also paying attention to his ambivalent attitude towards incomprehensibility and endless division.51 This more recent Blake scholarship is indicative of a general trend of looking for modern and Postmodernist traces in Romanticism: questions of copy versus original, repetition, difference, multiplicity, intertextuality, discontinuity, rupture, reversal, selfreflection, presence, identity, and totality are frequently discussed.52 In terms of knowledge and power, one can, as Ira Livingston points out, also speak of continuity between Romanticism and Postmodernism: “Postmodern transnationalization of capital and the redoubled saturation of disciplinary technologies represent the breaking of the wave that swelled in Romanticism”.53 As a result, period boundaries are questioned and Postmodernist theory is combined with other approaches.54 Even more recently, critics have started to approach the problem from the opposite direction: Romantic traces are discovered in contemporary theory.55 Thus two lines of thought meet in this study. One comes from Romanticism and leads to Postmodernism, and the other comes from Postmodernism and moves towards Romanticism. It is at their intersection that I would like to situate the present study, forming a new bulb of criticism. It is yet another boundary zone or cross-road – an appropriate place for Romanticism, whose semiotics goes back to medieval Christian beliefs and at the same time anticipates poststructuralist frameworks. Whether Romanticism is Postmodernist, Postmodernist theory Romantic, or Postmodernism a ubiquitous phenomenon, their connection seems to have been established, though it is not uncontested. Anachronistic readers of Romantic texts run the danger of being accused of ignoring contextual, historical, and textual signals. I would like to show that, once sufficient commonalities are established between seemingly disparate 51 52

53 54 55

See, for example, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993). See Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents. Seyhan is interested in representation, temporality, and alterity and sees similarities between Romanticism and Postmodernist theory (see her “Introduction”). This results in cross-readings with Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Menninghaus also approaches the problem of reflection through Benjamin and Derrida. See Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdoppelung. Livingston’s reading juxtaposes English Romanticism with completely different disciplines such as physics (chaos theory) or medicine (neurology), but also integrates Foucault and Derrida. His entire conceptualization is strongly informed by Deleuze and Guattari. See Livingston, Arrow of Chaos. Except for Livingston, there is a tendency to concentrate on early German Romanticism and on theoretical or philosophical texts. The present study proposes to broaden this perspective to not only include literary texts, but also works by late Romantics such as Eichendorff and the works of women writers (such as Charlotte Smith) whose scholarly reception tends to be limited to gender studies approaches, who seem further removed from the theoretical avant-garde thinking associated with postmodern theory. Livingston, Arrow of Chaos, 5. See the introduction to Copley and Whale, eds., Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, 1–10. See Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory.

Postmodernist Romanticism or Romantic Postmodernism?

25

texts, a cross-reading can supply explanations that are not given by the Romantic text itself but are within its potential. A cross-reading with Deleuze and Guattari reveals both the similarities and differences between Romanticism and Postmodernism. In The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, Clemens focuses on the theoretical aspects of this particular relation.56 I would like to extend his explorations to literary texts. The key word for Clemens is “multiplicity” – a concept that is taken up in this study’s discussion of Whitman. In his reading of Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being, Clemens arrives at the conclusion: “Romanticism is obsessed with multiplicity”.57 The primacy of multiplicity in the works of Deleuze and Guattari serves as a basis for the discussion of their Postmodernist Romanticism, which can be determined from their position between signification and evasion and between the one and the multiple. These are, as I will show in chapter 2 and chapter 7, problems of Romantic semiotics as well as of the Romantic subject and its space. Unsurprisingly, Deleuze and Guattari privilege the multiple over the one. Unifying, organizing, binary, or hierarchical systems are rejected in favour of multiplicity and combination (what they call “assemblages”).58 Following Alain Badiou and Gayatri Spivak, Clemens demonstrates that behind this anti-transcendentalism and anti-Platonism lie metaphysical ideas and organic models. Via a reading of Bergson, Clemens localizes Deleuze and Guattari’s “project in a Romantic genealogy” founded on different semiotic, political, philosophical, and epistemological principles.59 The “repudiation of organization” stands out as a principle that not only governs Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of “philosophy as a tool box”, but is also reflected in the structure of their own text (A Thousand Plateaus), which is neither coherent (or arborescent) nor authoritative, but “proffer[s] an invitation, which the reader is absolutely free to refuse”.60 The outcome of this experiment is viewed critically by Clemens. In a few pages, he lists all his problems with Deleuze and Guattari. He criticizes their indecision about concepts such as nomadology, their falling back into binary oppositions, the circularity of their argument, the relationship between philosophy and literature, their concept of multiplicity as a fold, their understanding of the ‘event’, their philosophy of the State that is so broad that it can be applied to anything, their own typologizing, and, above all, their attempt to dispel meaning which necessitates its explicit discussion. Although some of Clemens’ doubts about Deleuze and Guattari are legitimate, he does not ade56 57 58

59 60

Ibid., 133–53. Ibid., 133. This is part of a critique of Idealism and Neo-Platonism that is, as several critics show, not a complete refutation. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Nathan Widder, “The Rights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the Univocity of Being,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001): 437–53; Daniel W. Smith, “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism,” Continental Philosophy Review 38 (2006): 89–123. Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, 139. Ibid., 147.

26

Introduction

quately relate them to Romantic concepts. His argument only returns to Romanticism when he addresses State philosophy and the fact that Deleuze and Guattari tend towards revolutionary, utopian thoughts and the overreaching of philosophical thought. Despite his consistent unease with Deleuze and Guattari’s negation and their inevitable treatment of meaning, Clemens does not identify this dilemma as a typically Romantic problem (since his focus lies on the Romantic and postmodern notion of the role of institutions in the State and in philosophy, this omission does not weaken his argument). Since it is exactly this semiotic tension that characterizes Romantic ‘a-limitation’, I will devote chapter 2 to its exploration starting with the Enlightenment and finishing with Deleuze and Guattari’s Romantic semiotics. Given the affinities between Romanticism and Postmodernism in general and Deleuze and Guattari’s status as “exemplary Romantics”,61 their explicit treatment of Romantic texts and authors does not come as a surprise. Of course, they champion the Modernists, particularly Proust and Kafka, but there is a place for the Romantics as well. In Melville and Whitman they see an American Romanticism that exemplifies their own way of thinking. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a different kind of book – a book of the West.62 Kleist, Lenz, and Büchner (in contrast to Goethe) are also associated with a certain way of movement that is celebrated as ‘nomadic’ or ‘rhizomatic’ in A Thousand Plateaus, but “American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent”.63 Melville’s Moby-Dick (see chapter 3) and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (see chapter 7) are analyzed with the concepts in mind that Deleuze and Guattari suggest. While their interpretations offer interesting starting points, their concept of the United States of America as a land without limits exhibits a naïve celebration of America, which uncritically adopts the American self-image,64 while other Romantic authors such as Blake, Novalis or Hoffmann would have been equally useful for their concepts. In the present study, Melville, and Whitman provide two points of entry and of exit to the analysis of ‘a-limitation’ as a literary problem, though they are by no means the only ones. On the contrary, the origin of Deleuze and Guattari’s own problem with meaning lies in German Romanticism. Therefore I take seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s invitation to enter their book and also to move beyond its scope. Deleuze and Guattari’s various concepts are juxtaposed with Romantic texts, but I also transcend the limits of their conceptual thinking. This means that context and theory cannot be treated as mutually exclusive. Recent criticism on the relation of Romanticism and Postmodernism shows that obsessive deconstructionist readings are being abandoned in favour of a broader perspective that includes historical and social problems such as race, gender, and class. While one of the 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 153. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. Ibid., 28. At this point, McGann’s (see McGann, Romantic Ideology) concept of ideology actually applies to Deleuze and Guattari’s image of America.

Delimiting

27

great dangers of Postmodernist theoretical thinking is its remoteness from life and historical and political reality, it also bears within it the potential to lead the critical reader to a combined theoretical and contextual exploration of cultural artefacts. Where Clemens complains about the indecision expressed in such categories as “‘nomadology’ wildly oscillating between the poles of impersonal philosophical conceptuality on the one hand, and pure ethical value on the other”,65 I would like to exploit this potential for describing spatial practices in literature, for example the effects of urbanization on the way the ocean was seen and treated. One could make a similar point for the highly distorted idea of the ‘diagrammatic’ raised in A Thousand Plateaus, which can be traced back to Romantic semiotics, or the idea of the becoming-woman that can be traced back to gender concepts in literary texts around 1800. These examples of a possible combination of theory and cultural context once again point to the three dimensions of Romantic ‘a-limitation’ (space, sign, and subject in this case). Both Romantic texts and the Postmodernist theory developed in A Thousand Plateaus suggest the same interdependence of these three dimensions concerning boundary phenomena. Neither Romanticism nor A Thousand Plateaus offer an explicit theory of ‘a-limitation’. A-limitation is a concept that includes many well-known Romantic and Postmodernist phenomena such as the sublime, irony, paradox, self and nonself, the body without organs, smooth space, the diagrammatic, multiplicity, and assemblage, but it cannot be reduced to the sum of these phenomena. ‘A-limitation’ is a Romantic concept that surfaces in a number of Modernist texts and achieves its peak in Postmodernist theory, because the Romantic rhizome spreads into those periods.

Delimiting In an article later published in his Contribution to the Nation the American philosopher and semiotician Charles Saunders Peirce writes: “The man who puts pen to paper to produce anything like a treatise should, for his readers’ sake, and for his own, begin by defining precisely what his book is intended to tell.”66 Since this is a study about semiotics (and even Deleuze and Guattari seem to adhere to this call by writing an almost arborescent introduction to A Thousand Plateaus), I will try to follow his demand and lay out the basis for the model of ‘a-limitation’ in the following section on boundaries. Since this is also a study about Romanticism, I would like to appropriate the words of William Blake to complement my attempt to delineate the study’s goals: “[Dear]

65 66

Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, 148. Charles Sanders Peirce, Contributions to The Nation. 1894–1900. Vol. 2, eds. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1978) 277.

28

Introduction

Reader, [forgive] what you do not approve”.67Any project of this scope will necessarily include gaps and flaws that the specialist scholar will immediately identify. Romanticism conceived as a rhizomorphous structure consists of many different bulbs which are usually kept apart in arborescent notions of Romanticism. Trying to bring German, English, and American Romanticism together necessitates covering not only a long time period (from the 1780s to the 1890s), but also crossing the boundaries of established epistemological paradigms.68 What holds this unconventional undertaking together is the third aspect of this study: the question of the limit, its dissolution, transgression, and transcendence, in short, its Entgrenzung or its ‘a-limitation’. Since this is therefore a study about limits, not only in Romanticism but also in Postmodernist thinking, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s warning shall be added to its mottoes and guidelines: “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.”69 In my reading of this quotation, the smooth space stands for methodological constructs, which are insufficient to recuperate an analysis of a text. These three aspects delimit the scope of this study: semiotics, Romanticism, and limits. They form the recurring element that creates unity within the difference.70 The phenomenon of ‘a-limitation’ as I understand it is not restricted to Romanticism – hence the combination with Postmodernist theory – but it is a Romantic phenomenon that has its origins not only in the Romantic idea of the sign, but also in the changes that the ideas of the subject and the environment undergo during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In all of these dimensions – sign, subject, space – ‘a-limitation’ takes place. Therefore the three main parts of this study are devoted to one dimension each. The starting point for the analysis of ‘a-limitation’ in fictional texts is the Romantic semiotics described in chapter 2 (Magic words: the semiotics of Romanticism). Following Peirce’s call, I shall, in the introductory chapter 1 (Boundaries), define what I understand by the neologism ‘a-limitation’. After that the reader is free to focus on fur67 68

69 70

William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988) 145. Comparisons between Romanticisms are usually limited to either of the following relations: German-English, German-American, English-American. See, for example, Hubert Zapf, “English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism: An Intercultural Comparison,” Romantic Continuities, eds. Günther Blaicher and Michael Gassenmeier (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1992) 86–104. More recent studies with a philosophical or theoretical focus integrate all three Romanticisms. An example of a study focusing on literature is Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance. Chai focuses mainly on the American Renaissance including Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is not analyzed in detail in the present study. There are some points of contact, such as German Idealism, the discussion of symbols and allegory, but overall Chai’s study focuses on theological questions. I decided to approach Romanticism from semiotics, consciously avoiding the debate surrounding symbols and allegories so as to focus on language development and sign models, instead. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 551. Deleuze and Guattari write about A Thousand Plateaus: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs.” (24).

Delimiting

29

ther theoretical aspects of ‘a-limitation’ by reading the theoretical chapters 4, 6, and 8 or on its three dimensions in the interpretative chapters 3, 5 and 7. All of the chapters are interdependent, but, with a basic understanding of ‘a-limitation’, they can also be read separately if the reader is only interested in a particular text. The multiplicity of texts offers a variety of approaches to ‘a-limitation’ and should also demonstrate its universal scope without exhausting the concept, for it is a concept with fluid boundaries that is difficult to demarcate. Thus this study approximates the Romantic rhizome-book that Blake, Melville, Whitman, and Deleuze and Guattari wrote.

1. Boundaries

Three Romantic examples A single figure in a monk’s frock stands on the shore. His back is turned to the land as he watches the dark ocean with its breaking waves and the endless sky, a lonely subject confronted with infinite space. Several boundaries organize this dyad of subject and space depicted by Caspar David Friedrich in Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea) from 1810. The beach is painted in ochre and the sea in dark green. The different colors create a distinct boundary between land and sea. Upon closer inspection, however, the viewer can no longer be sure whether this is the shore-line. The monk seems to stand on an elevated part of the beach which does not permit the viewer to see the coastline. At the same time, the boundary between beach and sea is transgressed: the green bushels of beach grass seem to merge with the green waves. The uncertainty of the gaze leaves room for three interpretations: there is a boundary between land and sea, there is no boundary between land and sea, the boundary is a zone where land and sea merge. The painting presents a second uncertain boundary between the sea and the sky. The dark sea fades into the dark sky which then gradually becomes lighter and lighter until it turns dark again at the upper edge of the painting rendering the horizon indefinite, too. Der Mönch am Meer illustrates the elusive nature of boundaries. What seems to be an organizing boundary (the shore-line or the horizon) reveals itself as a zone or a disrupted line. The subject (the monk) is confronted with an uncertain space, a smooth space in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology. In order to understand the world, humans need boundaries.1 Their uncertainty entails problems of identification. It is not only the subject in the painting but also the spectator who faces uncertainty, emptiness, and 1

See Norbert Wokart, “Differenzierungen im Begriff ‘Grenze’. Zur Vielfalt eines scheinbar einfachen Begriffs,” Literatur der Grenze. Theorie der Grenze, eds. Richard Faber and Barbara Naumann (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995) 276. Wokart shows how undifferentiated the term boundary and its semantic field are, but also stresses that it is equally important for Western thought. About 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Anaximander already considered boundaries vital elements in the philosophy of being. I will use ‘boundary’ as a neutral term for a line (or zone) that separates two structures (this can mean a cut, an exclusion or an inclusion).

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Boundaries

perhaps even danger. Heinrich von Kleist associated a disturbing image with the spectator’s perspective: “Since the picture in its monotonous and shoreless nature has nothing to delimit it but its own frame, it makes one feel as if, for the moment of contemplation, one’s eyelids had been cut off.”2 Kleist’s commentary is based on the assumption that the spectator is not directly challenged by a sublime scenery – she is not the monk attempting to understand infinity – but that she interprets space and subjectivity indirectly through a third category: the sign. Profoundly disturbed by the absence of boundaries, the spectator seeks reassurance in the semiotic nature of the object. Like a paratext, the frame designates the image as sign. This iconic sign of smooth space leaves the gazing subject with a feeling of mutilation and violation. Between sign (painting), space, and subject, something occurs that is caused by the failure to delimit or to identify clear boundaries: a-limitation. This section gives a brief outline of the mechanisms involved in the triadic concept of alimitation. Scenes like this can be found in Romantic literature as well. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the misty sea presents itself as a space of moral transgression and the confusion of life and death: I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. […] I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead men were at my feet.3

The ancient mariner cannot bear the sight of the rotting sea that defies (spatial and moral) orientation, but the ship is no longer a safe place either. The repetitive structure of the first of the quoted stanzas expresses the dissolution of the ship-sea boundary semiotically (I looked – I looked, rotting sea – rotting deck). Seeing implies surveying and control. It is connected to understanding and to power. In Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial theory, seeing means perceiving space as striated (ordered). Viewing the optic from afar requires and creates boundaries: horizons and backgrounds.4 The speaker in 2

3 4

My translation of “…und da es [das Bild], in seiner Einförmigkeit und Uferlosigkeit, nichts, als den Rahm, zum Vordergrund hat, so ist es, wenn man es betrachtet, als ob Einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären.” Heinrich von Kleist, “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” Heinrich von Kleist. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. 2, ed. Helmut Sembdner, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962) 327. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. Martin Sconfield (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2003) 215. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 546f.

Three Romantic examples

33

the poem loses this orientation. He needs to close his eyes because of the uncertainty of boundaries further described in the second of the quoted stanzas: sky and sea are merged through the chiasm in the third line of the stanza. Unable to control the three spaces (ship, sea, and sky), the self (I) closes his eyes and yet is still forced to see the dead. In Coleridge’s poem the blurring of boundaries leads to a disintegration of the self and its subsequent need to reiterate its liminal experience (in a frame narrative, the mariner tells his story to a wedding guest). The comments in the margins simulate the experience of epistemological uncertainty for the reader, whose eye continues to skip from text to gloss and from gloss to text (sea-sky-sky-sea) negotiating the meaning of these unclear boundaries.5 Through the gloss the confusion of the “eye” and the “I” also becomes a semiotic phenomenon. A-limitation does not have to be as frightening an experience as in Kleist’s notion of the severed eyelid or, in the ancient mariner’s view, death even with eyes (wide) shut. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature illustrates that the subject’s own dissolution can also be desired: Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. […] In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.6

Emerson’s famous transparent eye-ball (also a pun on the homophony of ‘eye’ and ‘I’) leaves all egotism behind and becomes dissolved in the process of seeing. For Emerson, the link from the gazing subject-less I/eye to language is the horizon. Sight and orientation are possible, but the quote shows that for Emerson the horizon is an instrument of a-limitation as well. A-limitation is not a static concept that dissolves the subject into chaos and prevents any kind of perception and understanding. Instead, it occurs in different modes and strengths. In this exaggerated experience of transcendence in the face of the masculine sublime, for which the visual perception from an elevated perspective is characteristic, space is perceived as infinite but at the same time bound by the horizon. Thus, this quotation stresses the importance of the ‘limitation’ in the neologism ‘alimitation’. Romantic a-limitation does not imply the complete disregard for, or the dissolution of boundaries. It is the oscillation between the transgression, transcendence, or dissolution of a boundary and its reinstatement. This means that a-limitation is a triadic concept based on an initial dyad. The extension of the dyad into a triad occurs on two levels. In the confrontation with boundaries, 5

6

Wheeler describes the reading process as a threshold experience creating uncertainties for the reader and raising awareness of the fact that reading can also mean misreading. See Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1981) 42–64. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York and London: Norton, 2001) 29.

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there are several dyads: two spaces on each side of the boundary (dyad) that are complemented by the boundary (triad) and the boundary and its dissolution, transgression, or transcendence (dyad) that leads to a new boundary (triad). On the second level, alimitation begins with the interaction of two categories. This interaction is due to the confrontation between two concepts (subject-sign, subject-space, or space-sign), but continuity or becoming can only be a result of a triad (sign-subject-space). A search for concepts and terms suitable for the description of such boundary phenomena consequently needs to consider binary approaches as well as triadic ones.

Dyadic approaches Postmodernist thinking, both structuralist and poststructuralist, provides a fertile ground for the development of a concept of a-limitation because it engages with Modernist literature in order to celebrate concepts such as transgression, openness, ambiguity, and infinite semiosis. Most theories, however, only offer a dyad of two of the categories of a-limitation. Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Umberto Eco are concerned with the relation between sign and subject. A theory that explicitly includes space, but is still indebted to binary structuralist ways of thinking, can be found in Juri Lotman’s writings. Only in Foucault’s concept of transgression, however, do the three categories start to come together. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia (consisting of the two volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) the triad and its mechanism are developed further. Sign, subject, and space function according to similar principles, but their interrelation needs to be made clear for the concept of a-limitation by drawing on the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. Lacan stresses the close relation between subject and sign in “Subversion of Subject and Dialectic of Desire” (Écrits). The subject is created through discourse and in the confrontation with the Other. This is represented as an interrupted chain of signification in which the signifier ‘I’ needs to pass the Other in order to prove that the subject exists. Lacan’s definition of the signifier illustrates the dynamics between sign and subject: “a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier. This signifier will therefore be the signifier for which all the other signifiers represent the subject: that is to say, in the absence of this signifier, all the other signifiers represent nothing, since nothing is represented only for something else”.7 In this definition he subscribes to an almost pragmatic definition of the signifier and adds the subject to the relation between sign and thing. Thus, the subject is also constructed by language. Even the unconscious is a semiotic structure for Lacan. As a system of signifiers, subjectivity is determined by 7

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, ed. Alan Sheridan, Repr. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 350.

Dyadic approaches

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absence, or lack, and a symbolic order, which Deleuze and Guattari attempt to overcome in their critique of psychoanalysis. Not only Lacan but most postmodern thinkers adhere to the notion that the subject is constructed by signs or even aspires to become pure language (or sign or discourse). In his inaugural lecture of 1970, Foucault yearns for a nameless voice to speak on his behalf: I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I must present today, and into the ones I shall have to give here, perhaps for many years to come. I should have preferred to be enveloped by speech, and carried away well beyond all possible beginnings, rather than have to begin it myself. I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I should only have needed to join in, to continue the sentence it had started and lodge myself, without really being noticed, in its interstices, as if it had signalled to me by pausing, for an instant, in suspense. Thus there would be no beginning, and instead of being the one from whom discourse proceeded, I should be at the mercy of its chance unfolding, a slender gap, the point of its possible disappearance.8

Barthes finds more passionate words in Roland Barthes: Once I produce, once I write, it is the Text itself which (fortunately) dispossesses me of my narrative continuity. The Text can recount nothing; it takes my body elsewhere, far from my imaginary person, toward a kind of meaningless speech which is already the speech of the People, of the non-subjective mass (or the generalized subject), even if I am still separated from it by my way of writing [italics by Barthes].9

In the same text, Barthes compares writing about oneself to “freewheeling in language” and to the idea of suicide.10 The desire to lose individual subjectivity, to dissolve into the text can be found in a book that is, by the way, written in the very style of a-limitation. Neither a novel, nor an autobiography, nor an academic study, it oscillates between genres and styles. Photos, drawings, and poetic miniatures complement the prose fragments exploring different themes. While Lacan’s symbolic language is one of law and order, Foucault’s and Barthes’s desire to become sign, which is a genuine Romantic desire as the analysis of texts such as Heinrich von Ofterdingen shows, stems from a different idea of language: arbitrary, playful, and transgressive. Kristeva’s semiotic (as opposed to the symbolic) serves to illustrate the point that signs do not always have to be organized in ordered systems. Kristeva calls the subversion of the symbolic transgression. Transgression is therefore a mechanism of the semiotic.11 Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic is quite different from Saussurean models of the sign. While classic semiotics views semiosis as governed by 8 9 10 11

Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston et al.: Routledge and Paul, 1981) 51. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010) 4. Ibid., 56. See Julia Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

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language laws, Kristeva assigns the semiotic to the level anterior to symbolic language production. The subject’s desire to transgress boundaries, be it his boundaries, moral, or spatial boundaries, is rooted in psychological processes that also lead to transgressive language. In “Word, Dialogue and Novel” Kristeva explains the idea of transgressive language. Most importantly, transgressive language is poetic. This is also a Romantic concept. Language as a system can only be overcome by a poetic reconfiguration. For Kristeva, a binary system is insufficient to describe poetic language.12 Poetic language is double, but not in a dyadic or a hierarchical sense. Poetic language is vertically and horizontally organized (between subject and addressee and between texts).13 It is spatialized. Kristeva explains the link between moral, political, social, and linguistic transgression with Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. While the realistic novel obeys a 0-1 (dyadic, binary) logic, accepting the law (linguistic as well as theological or social), and is therefore of a monological nature, the discourse of the carnival is dialogical (0-2): “By adopting a dream logic, it transgresses rules of linguistic code and social morality as well.”14 The carnivalesque, transgressive, dialogical, polyphonic language is mostly that of twentieth-century literature.15 It is composed of ambivalences, distances, analogies, relationships, non-exclusive oppositions, and includes the fantastic, madness, split personalities, dreams, death, eccentric language, mixed genres, and fast transition.16 Transgressive language is a matter of modern literature for most thinkers including Kristeva and Barthes.17 Umberto Eco’s theory of the aperta opera, the open work, is based on the same assumption. According to Eco, open works of art always have multiple meanings (one signifier for many signifieds).18 He situates the age of the genuine open work after Romanticism: “To close our consideration of the Romantic period, it will be useful to refer to the first occasion when a conscious poetics of the open work appears. The moment is late-nineteenth-century Symbolism”.19 One of the main examples is Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Others are Kafka’s works or Brecht’s method of 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19

See Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 40. Kristeva’s description of transgressive language naturally entails that intertextuality is a means of the language of a-limitation. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 41. Stallybrass and White also work with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque as transgression. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). See Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 42, 56. See ibid., 48–53. Barthes argues that replete literature is like a cupboard full of sense where nothing is ever lost. It is readable (“readerly”), but no longer writable, and its climax is Romantic art. As the total work of art is the opposite of the plural text (the text of a-limitation), Barthes considers openness/transgression a non-Romantic trait of texts as well. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 200f. See Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogeni (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). See ibid., 8.

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Verfremdung. Works like these are “based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations)”.20 I will argue that this form of openness, which includes the reader in the generation of meaning, is a genuine Romantic phenomenon. In light of the theoretical bias towards Modernist literature as transgressive literature that leads to boundary crossings in language and subjectivity, it is not surprising that most scholars identify transgression or Entgrenzung as a phenomenon attributed to Modernist literature.21 Gabriele Schwab, whose monograph is the most exhaustive exploration of Entgrenzung in English and American literature, wants to claim the end of the subject in connection with a new way of writing as Entgrenzung for modern literature as well. Taking aspects from Lacan, Kristeva, Winnicott’s game theory, and Ehrenzweig’s theory of art, she looks at different levels of subject-Entgrenzung and its linguistic manifestation in modern texts. According to Schwab, literary language- and subject-Entgrenzung are intriguing for the reader because they have their origin in the intermediary field, or in the semiotic (Kristeva), and appeal to the same areas in the reader’s mind. Poetic language, which is strongly influenced by principles of the intermediary, tends to lack symbolic characteristics. Schwab considers Moby-Dick to be a very early stage of Entgrenzung. Its intertextuality, the whale as a symbol of devouring and penetration, Ahab’s madness, the notion of androgyny, the unreliable narrator, and the mixing of genres are named as indicators of Entgrenzung.22 According to Schwab, genuine Entgrenzung only occurs in modern texts that deny totality such as Finnegan’s Wake, The Waves, The Unnamable, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Schwab also sees Entgrenzung as a challenge to binary thinking.23 I adhere to the argument that modern and postmodern art and literature create alimitation phenomena that differ from Romantic a-limitation. Yet a-limitation, which includes the concepts of Entgrenzung, openness, and transgression as developed by the theories above, cannot be claimed exclusively for Modernist literature because it is a 20 21

22 23

Ibid., 11f. See, for example, Helmut Koopmann, “Entgrenzung: zu einem literarischen Phänomen um 1900,” Fin de siècle: zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, eds. Roger Bauer et.al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1977). In his history of modern literature, Helmuth Kiesel lists a catalogue of what could be called phenomena of subject a-limitation: Entgrenzung into society, nature, sexual encounters, experiments with drugs, war, occultism, the encounter with the creature, modern cities, industrial landscapes, and art. The means are: intertextuality, sound poetry, genre mixing, fragments, intermediality, and Gesamtkunstwerk (totality of the work of art). See Helmuth Kiesel, Die Geschichte der literarischen Moderne. Sprache – Ästhetik – Dichtung im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2004). Neither Koopmann nor Kiesel offer a theory of Entgrenzung. See Gabriele Schwab, Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen. Zur Subjektivität im modernen Roman (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1987) 76–92. See ibid., 223.

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genuine Romantic phenomenon. The section on Walt Whitman (chapter 7) and the conclusion (chapter 9) treat the differences between Romantic and Modernist a-limitation. Moby-Dick, however, can be considered to be a prototypical case of Romantic a-limitation (see chapter 3). The postmodern theories and the ensuing approaches discussed above demonstrate that a-limitation is a concept that has been present for a while, but has not yet been adequately described. Its Romantic origins and its triadic structure – including not only the subject (and its aspired dissolution) and language, but also space – cannot be explained sufficiently by the theories briefly delineated above. Even Lotman’s theory of art, which approaches the crossing of boundaries from a spatial perspective, remains unsatisfactory because it restricts transgression to certain genres and adheres to a binary way of thinking. One of Lotman’s assumptions about art is that the way the fictional world is (spatially) constructed points to a certain general view of the real world.24 This means that Lotman subscribes to the idea of language as a potential epistemological instrument that constructs the world at the same time as it represents it. The topographical layout of the fictional world mirrors its topological organization.25 Spatial relations represent specific cultural models by topologically organizing semes into oppositions with positive and negative connotations. The opposition high-low can, for example, mean culture, liberty, technology versus nature, slavery. The opposition open versus closed can mean liberty versus imprisonment, but can also have the opposite connotation of danger versus security. Whether living in a house, as opposed to travelling through the woods, is associated with notions of confinement or of security has to be established for each text. Lotman demonstrates his theory by analyzing different literary texts. The most important topological feature is the border dividing space into two disjunctive spaces that cannot be transgressed. Each protagonist is assigned to a particular space (which can be open or closed). When a protagonist crosses the border into another space, an event takes place which in turn is part of the plot.26 Of course, each element of the plot can have different meanings in an artistic text. Only texts with border-crossing heroes have a plot. Those that lack plot support a given ideology or order. If the hero crosses the border, a series of events is brought into motion that can only come to an end with a hero who settles in one space. Lotman’s theory aims to describe a mechanism that is at work in most literary texts. It is important to note that the crossing of boundaries is significant for literature in general. Yet, his combination of topographical, topological, and semantic border transgression does not suffice to define a-limitation because it is not only limited to certain genres, 24 25

26

See Yuri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977) 211. See ibid., 217–31.The same idea is combined with a stronger focus on intercultural transfer in Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind, trans. Ann Shukman (London and New York: I.B. Tauris 1990) 150. See Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 231–39.

Towards triadic models: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce

39

which automatically excludes poems such as “The Ancient Mariner”, but also because it uses a binary conception of space as a container that is divided into several spaces through boundaries.

Towards triadic models: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce In Foucault’s Essay “Preface to Transgression” (1963), the link between transgression, the subject, and language is central.27 Transgression entails overcoming the subject, overcoming philosophical or dialectical and discursive language. Foucault further elaborates on the characteristics of such a non-discursive language in La pensée du dehors (1966). He poses the question of what happens to language after the proposition ‘I speak’ has been uttered.28 The self-reflexive sentence is devoid of meaning, but it also creates an opening to the limitlessness of language. The subject “fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space”; what remains is pure language.29 In the outside (imagined as a kind of space), beyond the usual boundaries of language, language and thinking exist without the subject.30 The outside is, of course, difficult to describe. In his attempt to do so, Foucault relies on metaphors. Language has to test its boundaries. It may be transformed into sound or silence, into repetition, murmur or tremor.31 Thus, within Foucault’s philosophical framework, becoming-sign is only desirable if this sign is determined by a liminal semiotics that is removed from the generation of meaning. Notions such as meaning, totality, the absolute, and its embodiment: God, are consequently not part of Foucault’s concept of transgression. In fact, Foucault names the death of God as the prerequisite for transgression. With the removal of God, the subject 27

28

29 30

31

The essay is published as a homage to Georges Bataille on whose concept of transgression as the crossing of moral boundaries and the desire to dissolve the self. Foucault builds his own theories. Foucault maintains the central role sexuality plays in transgression, but locates the entire concept in the future instead of in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a detailed discussion of “Preface” in conjunction with other essays by Foucault and Bataille see Stefan Wunderlich, Michel Foucault und die Frage der Literatur: Beitrag zu einer Archäologie des poststrukturalistischen Denkens (Frankfurt a. M.: Books on Demand, 2000) 114–34. See Michel Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” trans. Robert Hurley, The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology., ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998) 147f. Ibid., 148. See ibid., 150. Referring to Nietzsche and Mallarmé, Foucault diagnoses the second half of the nineteenth century with this. In parenthesis, however, he states that since Schlegel’s theories discourse and subject are tied together (see 151). I will show that in Romanticism, language and the disappearance of the subject through becoming-sign are already present. See ibid., 152ff.

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becomes the focus of transgression: “By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience that is interior and sovereign.”32 Foucault uses the image of the inwards-turned eye to explain this effect of transgression. The eye is both a boundary and its transgression in the shape of the gaze crosses the transparent border of the eye. When it is turned the other way around, transgression is intensified: the proximity of language and death becomes clear; a language without subject can evolve in the dark emptiness. In his metaphorical choices and the conceptualization of the relation between subjectivity and language Foucault exhibits similarities with Romantic a-limitation. Emerson’s transparent eye-ball, which implies a powerful and dissolved subject, and Foucault’s inwards-turned eyeball show how closely Romantic and postmodern ideas are related. Both could be described by what Foucault calls “the figure of being in the act of transgressing its own limit[s]”.33 Because of these parallels (or Romantic traces) and the spatial metaphors, Foucault’s concept of transgression is valuable to the development of a theory of a-limitation. Despite the historical differences – Romantic religion does not proclaim the death of God, but merely carefully replaces him with the poet, and the eroticism of Romanticism is far from being comparable to de Sade’s excesses that Foucault refers to – the mechanisms of Foucault’s notion of transgression are vital for the understanding of boundary phenomena.34 He avoids defining the limit itself. Sometimes Foucault’s limits seem to be boundaries and other times they appear to be limits. The definitions of boundary or border (or the German word Grenze) and limit or transgression (the German Limit, Überschreitung/Entgrenzung) vary considerably in other texts. Quite often these terms are used interchangeably and sometimes they describe very different phenomena.35 The theoretical chapters (4, 6, 8) will deal with the specific boundaries of language, subjects, and spaces. Foucault prefers the term ‘limit’ because it implies an absolute boundary and thereby emphasizes the processual aspect of transgression: Transgression is an action that involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to 32

33 34

35

Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” trans. Robert Hurley, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998) 71. Ibid., 81. The immanent limits created by the absence of God also exist in Romantic boundary crossings. In “Language and Literature”, literature takes the place of sexuality in the process of transgression. See Wunderlich, Michel Foucault und die Frage der Literatur: Beitrag zu einer Archäologie des poststrukturalistischen Denkens 127f. There is no entry for Entgrenzung in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie for example. Wokart notes that similar problems arise when trying to define boundary, border, barrier, threshold, or limit. Wokart also elaborates on the twofold function of the border. See Wokart, “Differenzierungen”.

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be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line that closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable.36

The crossing of boundaries in transgression is, according to Foucault, an unlimited process. After one boundary has been crossed, it closes up and another boundary appears. Yet, there is another limit to which transgression then turns: the horizon of the uncrossable. Because of this second limit, Foucault’s transgression could be described as one of deferral and approximation. This idea, namely that there are two kinds of limits or boundaries, only implied by Foucault, is further developed by Deleuze and Guattari. Foucault’s concept of transgression also has a temporal dimension. The very idea of crossing a boundary has a linear element: the spatial transgression is also a temporal progression; striving for the beyond is connected to the future, perhaps even to eternity.37 This idea is already part of the Romantic concept of space and time. Schlegel speaks of Romantic poetry as “progressive Universalpoesie”38 (progressive, universal 36 37

38

Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” 73. The intimate connection between time and space is expressed by Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (time-space) that treats time as the fourth dimension of space. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination. Four essays, ed. Michael Holquist, 15th. reprint ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) 84. Classic chronotopes are, for example, the road (244) and the threshold (248). Both are boundary places occurring in Romanticism. Bakhtin mentions Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen as a Romantic travel narrative in which the road as the place of encounter is an important chronotope. Chronotopes are part of a theory of the novel: they are plot-generating and organizing features (see 250ff.) similar to Lotman’s boundary transgressions. This shows how important the time-space dimension of a-limitation is in general. There are other examples of the intersection of time and space in twentieth-century literary theory. Derrida’s concept of ‘differance’ (which is not a concept at all, according to Derrida) also includes a dynamic between space and time. Différer, explains Derrida, has two meanings: to differ and to defer. The second meaning encompasses a range of meanings that could be summarized under the term temporalization. Deferral connects space and time with each other: “We shall see, later, in what respects this temporalizing is also a temporalization and spacing, is space’s becoming-temporal and time’s becoming-spatial…” (136). Derrida uses writing as an example of the temporalization of language. There is always something, a lost presence or another sign, that precedes the sign. The chain of signs can be seen as a spatialization (leading to Derrida’s concept of the trace that negates origins altogether). See Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” trans. David B. Allison, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, ed. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 129–60. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005) 90. Manfred Frank’s impressive study on the problem of time in Romanticism could be read as a study of Romantic philosophy through the example of temporality. He demonstrates how for Schlegel time is a crucial element in the concepts of subjectivity, irony, allegory, and history. Frank also discusses the relation between time and space in Schlegel in great detail. In the triadic model of history (fall from paradise, suffering, and the promise of a new divine empire) time and space are parallels, but space can be understood as precipitated time. Both concepts are sub-

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poetry)39 in his Athenäums-Fragmente. He describes it through spatial and temporal metaphors: Nur sie kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden. Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen.40 (It alone can become, like an epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also – more than any other form – hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.)

Spatially, poetry reflects itself in an endless series of mirrors. Its temporal nature is the state of ‘becoming’: Die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie vollendet sein kann. […] Sie allein ist unendlich, wie sie allein frei ist, und das als ihr erstes Gesetz anerkennt, das die Willkür des Dichters kein Gesetz über sich leide.41 (The romantic type of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that in fact is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. […] It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.)

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sumed under the notion of becoming (see 73). In Novalis’s philosophy time and space are also interconnected. He sees space as the original sediment of time (188). For Novalis, time is fluid while space is substantial and fixed (see 184). Their relationship, however, is dynamic insofar as time is fluid space and space is fixed time and they constantly turn into each other (see 186). See Manfred Frank, Das Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik. Zeitbewußtsein und Bewußtsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung, 2nd ed. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1990). This shows that time and space are not the same in Romantic (or Postmodernist) philosophy, but that they are connected by two principles: becoming (or infinity) and mutual interdependence. Both principles are part of a-limitation. I will mostly analyze spatial aspects of a-limitation, but a temporal dimension of space has to be kept in mind and is included in the interpretation of texts such as the a-chronological narrative of Blake’s Jerusalem or the accelerated spatialization of time in Eichendorff’s Taugenichts. All translations from the Athenäums-Fragmente are from Kathleen M. Wheeler, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 46f. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005) 90. Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften 91. If Romantic art is progressive or progressing, it seems only sensible to understand its interpretation in the same way. Roland Barthes writes that progressive analysis avoids penetrating or closing the text. Instead, following the text gradually or step by step (a temporal, linear reading) leads to the starred text – a star-shaped dissolution. See Barthes, S/Z 13f.

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Following both Foucault and Schlegel, it seems plausible to consider time a part of the spatial dimension of a-limitation. The second important aspect of Foucault’s notion of transgression refers to the relation between transgression and limit: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. […] Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral that no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies; which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity.42

Transgression and limit are in an interdependent and dynamic relationship. Neither can exist without the other, but their relation is neither binary nor dichotomist. It is an interdependence that is also a constant merging. Similar mechanisms define Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the smooth and striated or the molar and molecular. Foucault’s concept of transgression is a valid basis for an examination of boundary phenomena in general, and those related to moral transgression in particular, as its extensive critical acclaim shows. Most of the research can be categorized into one of two groups: political transgression or moral transgression. Both are concerned with the transgression of social laws. Most monographs and essays treat different aspects of Foucauldian transgression. A coherent concept, however, is missing.43 The connection 42 43

Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” 73f. Examples of studies of political transgression in the sense of the subversion or inversion of social hierarchies are: Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, or Scott Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution Transgression in the Development of American Romance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993). Stallybrass and White focus on Bahktin as their theoretical framework. Bradfield’s main object is the transgression of social hierarchies, particularly in the formation of an American national literature. He links this form of subject transgression to the experience of the border. Studies of moral transgression in the broadest sense often relate transgression to the concepts of repetition, excess, alterity, paradox, or the uncanny. Joachim Küchenhoff links the German concept of Entgrenzung to excess. See Joachim Küchenhoff, “Das Fest und die Grenzen des Ich – Begrenzung und Entgrenzung im ‘vom Gesetz gebotenen Exzeß’,” Das Fest, eds. Walter Haug and Rainer Warning (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1989). Peter-André Alt sees transgression as one aspect of evil. His discussion includes de Sade. See Peter-André Alt, “Wiederholung, Paradoxie, Transgression. Versuch über die literarische Imagination des Bösen und ihr Verhältnis zur ästhetischen Erfahrung (de Sade, Goethe, Poe),” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 79 (2005) 531–564. Sabine Friedrich also focuses on evil and its rhetoric. Sabine Friedrich, Die Imagination des Bösen: zur narrativen Modellierung der Transgression bei Laclos, Sade und Flaubert (Tübingen: Narr, 1998). Monika Fludernik and HansJoachim Gehrke edited a volume of essays approaching the figure of the Grenzgänger (transgressor) from different perspectives with a major focus on questions of identity and alterity. The approaches range from theoretical and philosophical questions to considerations of cultural contact

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between transgression and language, the connection between transgression and the disappearance of the subject, the spatial aspects of transgression, the non-dualistic concepts implied by transgression, and finally, the idea of transgression as a process of deferral and approximation are important factors that also apply to a-limitation. Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy as developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia clarifies and further develops these aspects. Capitalism and Schizophrenia comprises two volumes, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) both written in collaboration by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. At first glance, the two books of this symphilosophical project seem to be quite different in style and content matter. AntiOedipus is a critique of psychoanalysis as based on lack and the Oedipal triangle (father, mother, child). Its dominant concept is the machine, the desiring machine, which replaces Oedipal concepts with a new form of psychoanalysis: schizoanalysis. A Thousand Plateaus is concerned with different possibilities of thinking subjectivity. Its dominant metaphor is space (lines, rhizomes, smooth and striated spaces, maps, charts, and trajectories). What is only hinted at in Anti-Oedipus becomes more explicit in A Thousand Plateaus: the connection between subjectivity, language, and space. In Anti-Oedipus subjectivity is discussed chiefly through the authors’s critique of the constitution of the subject defined by family relations and systemic lack. Their counter-proposal is to take seriously the desiring machines and, instead of insisting on a molar (whole) subject, to turn towards subjects that are molecular, i.e. constantly changing and connecting with partial objects thus forming bodies without organs. These ideas are further developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Anti-Oedipus already mentions the body without organs (or bwo), the molar and the molecular, territorialization and deterritorialization. A Thousand Plateaus advances these terms, further shifting the focus to space and adding concepts such as ‘rhizome’, ‘face’, and ‘nomadology’. Broadening their theoretical scope enables Deleuze and Guattari to not only employ a strong spatial metaphor but situations. A typology of boundaries is also part of the volume. See Monika Fludernik and HansJoachim Gehrke, eds., Grenzgänger zwischen Kulturen (Würzburg: Ergon, 1999). The collection of essays edited by Gerhard Neumann and Rainer Warning reflects on different aspects of transgression from E.T.A. Hoffmann to de Sade and Ernst Jünger to Stephen King, including a discussion of medieval texts and music. Situations of encounter and alterity (hence the title Literature as Ethnography) are of particular interest to the editors. The collection shows how diverse the theoretical concept of transgression (for example as understood by Foucault, de Certeau, and Lotman) and its application (for example dreams in Der Sandmann or forbidden love in Tristan) are. See Gerhard Neumann and Rainer Warning, eds., Transgressionen. Literatur als Ethnographie (Freiburg: Rombach 2003). On the one hand these diverse approaches to transgression demonstrate its omnipresence and importance (like the notion of the boundary, the notion of transgression touches upon fundamental epistemological and ethical questions). On the other hand they also show that a coherent theory is missing. I do not propose to solve the problem of transgression, but to offer a model for understanding boundary phenomena.

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also to use different semiotic theories (Saussure, Hjelmslev, and Peirce). Romantic literature also plays a greater role in A Thousand Plateaus and even Romanticism itself is spatially defined.44 Thus, the primary theoretical reference for this study will be A Thousand Plateaus. Since Anti-Oedipus, however, provides a more precisely formulated idea of limits, it is also included in the theoretical framework. “Oedipus is a limit”,45 write Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. “But ‘limit’ has many different meanings, since it can be at the beginning as an inaugural event, in the role of a matrix; or in the middle as a structural function ensuring the mediation of personages and the ground of their relations; or at the end as an eschatological determination.”46 With this functional definition of limit, Deleuze and Guattari extend the idea of the limit as a “boundary, frontier; an object serving to define a boundary, a landmark. In a narrower sense limit is defined as follows: A boundary or terminal point considered as confining or restricting; chiefly pl. bounds”.47 And its second meaning: “One of the fixed points between which the possible or permitted extent, amount, duration, range of action, or variation of anything is confined; a bound which may not be passed, or beyond which something ceases to be possible or allowable.”48 In Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, the limit is still a restricting boundary, but it can have different positions – beginning, middle, and end, – instead of being reduced to a terminal point or final boundary. This functional definition could be called a triad of the limit. Within their theory of desiring machines, Deleuze and Guattari then distinguish between different kinds of limits (absolute, relative, real, imaginary, and displaced).49 For the a-limitation model, which is not psychoanalytic (and can dispense with the real, imaginary, and displaced limit),50 the absolute and the relative limit are relevant: “We shall speak of an absolute limit every time the schizo-flows pass through the wall, scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the socius: the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse.”51 All three dimensions of boundary phenomena are united in this quotation: space (the wall as a spatial boundary), sign (scrambled codes and decoded flows), and subject (a body without organs). The crossing of boundaries as limit affects each dimension differently, but all of them are involved in the process; these 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 375–78. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 192. Ibid., 192. Oxford English Dictionary. Ibid. See ibid., 192f. Deleuze and Guattari make free use of Lacan’s real, imaginary, and fictive. The real limit is the resistance against capitalism. The imaginary limit is the projection of this real limit onto the origin or beginning of the development. The displaced limit is Oedipus as a result of the repression of desire (192f.). Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 192.

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processes occurring at the absolute limit are subsequently called a-limitation. A-limitation functions as a term for these boundary processes because there is also the relative limit that Deleuze and Guattari link to capitalism. It does not effect a breakthrough, but “is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall further away”.52 These two descriptions are represented by the two ways of reading a-limitation: first as ‘alimitation’ or destruction of the limit with the German equivalent of Entgrenzung (doing away with the boundary), and second as ‘a limitation’ in the sense of the existence of a limit. Foucault’s concept of transgression is thereby supplemented by a flexible idea of the limit as a boundary with several functions. The differentiation into several limits is reduced to two limits in the course of AntiOedipus. The absolute and the relative limits are also called the exterior and interior limits. Capitalism is described as having only interior, immanent or internal limits that are crossed, displaced, reconstituted, rediscovered as limits and surpassed again.53 Internal limits determine capitalist deterritorialization, which includes constant reterritorialization (reintroducing order through law, governing against the flows, state regulations). Schizophrenia poses the exterior limit to capitalism because it entails free and unregulated flow in a free state and a desocialized body without organs.54 De- and reterritorialization and the molar and the molecular combine the deferral or displacement of the interior with the approximation of the exterior limit.55 A-limitation functions as a combination of interior and exterior limits and encompasses both de- and re-territorialization: interior limits are surpassed and reinstated, and at the same time an exterior limit remains absolute. That is why the horizon as unattainable limit is a widely used image in Romantic literature and art.56 The horizon can be both: an unattainable limit and a boundary that recedes in front of the subject like a frontier. In the spatial theory of A Thousand Plateaus, the horizon is part of on ordered perception of space – striated space – and is linked to territory. This association is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Romantic hero as bound to the earth or territory, which signifies the “One-Alone” (a notion particular to German Romanticism), or to nomadic peoples of the earth, who are the “One-Crowd”.57 Music exemplifies the same relation between subjectified individual and orchestral whole. What results is the “dividual” – a form, a subject, a-limitation – a subject that is not based on

52 53 54 55 56

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Ibid., 192. See ibid., 251 and ibid., 259. See ibid., 267 and ibid., 288. On molar-molecular and limit see ibid., 337. See Koschorke’s detailed study: Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts. Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990). And on John Clare and Ralph Waldo Emerson see Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) 17–22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 375f.

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personhood but on effects and the relation between the individual and other people.58 With this term, Deleuze and Guattari borrow a Romantic concept expressing the individual as something that is inherently split and not whole (‘dividuum’ meaning separable).59 They assign different composers to different modes of Romanticism and declare that the modern age is no longer about the One-Alone (earth) or the One-Crowd, but about the cosmos. This new relation explodes the form-matter dichotomy (which they adopt from the structuralist semiotician Hjlemslev). Instead, a material-forces relation is created: “whereas romantic philosophy still appealed to a formal synthetic identity ensuring a continuous intelligibility of matter (a priori synthesis), modern philosophy tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in themselves”.60 Through this distinction, they contrast Romantic territoriality with the molecular and the deterritorialized and align themselves with a tradition which thinks of transgression or Entgrenzung as a modern phenomenon. In most cases, the binary oppositions posited by Deleuze and Guattari disintegrate: molar and molecular can turn into each other as smooth and striated. There is no pure rhizome or root-book, but mutual dependence and gradual difference. Territories become deterritorialized and then reterritorialized. Based on this premise, Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition between the Romantic and the modern is not sustainable. They attempt to define a boundary and then continually cross it by discussing Romantic authors such as Melville or Whitman who could also be designated as modern. I will show that their concepts of subjectivity (the body without organs, face, molar versus molecular, becoming), sign (different regimes of signs, the diagrammatic) and space (smooth versus striated, nomadology) can be applied to Romanticism because they are in fact inherently Romantic. During the period of Romanticism profound changes took place that correspond to the areas for which Deleuze and Guattari describe boundary phenomena that I shall call a-limitation. As a result of the Enlightenment’s heightened concern with the possibilities of and prerequisites for the representation of thought and truth, Romantic notions of the sign become increasingly unstable oscillating between what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘different regimes of signs’, between divine truth and arbitrary language systems. Chapter 2 explores this semiotics as a basis for the analysis in chapter 3. Chapter 4 provides the means for an analysis of semiotic a-limitation that is independent from the semiotics of Romanticism. Both kinds of subject a-limitation mentioned above (earth and crowd) are decidedly Romantic as chapter 5 shows. They are the result of a specifically Romantic construc58 59

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Ibid., 376. In Das Allgemeine Brouillon Novalis writes: “Das ächte Dividuum ist auch das ächte Individuum.” (The real dividual is also the real individual.) Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe. Vol 2. Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 692. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 377.

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tion of subjectivity that culminates in the destruction of a previously constructed subject and results in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becoming’, a concept similar to Schlegel’s progressive Universalpoesie. Chapter 6 is concerned with the philosophical construction and destruction (or territorialization, de- and reterritorialization) of the subject as process, while chapter 5 offers a reading of Romantic becoming primarily as becoming-woman. Not only the subject but also its environment undergoes changes in the late eighteenth and in the nineteenth century. A continuing striation of space (enclosures, new borders and laws, land reclamation through deforestation and draining, rectification of rivers) is countered by new (poetic) perceptions of space favoring novel ways of moving through space and interacting with the environment. That is why Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual and metaphorical approach (metaphorical and topological space) (see chapter 8) is complemented by a reading of texts against the historical and cultural background of their time in chapter 7. All chapters are primarily concerned with one of the three dimensions of a-limitation, which, in parts, correspond to the Deleuzian concepts introduced above. However, alimitation is not only defined by the different functions of limits and the three dimensions, but also by the interdependency of these dimensions. A Thousand Plateaus suggests their functional similarities, but does not explicitly mention or explain their relation to each other or their interaction. As the analysis of different Romantic texts shows, one dimension may be foregrounded, but once a boundary phenomenon occurs in one dimension, it can also be detected in the other two. Peirce’s model of the triadic sign can serve to explain the triadic nature of this interdependency. His entire philosophical concept is based on triads. The genuine sign (which can be broken down into three subcategories of signs) consists of three sides that each represent one category. The category of firstness is that of originality and feeling. Iconic signs belong to the first category because they theoretically signify only by their own quality. Obsistence governs the second category because it is always a reaction to something, and as soon as two things are involved, there is resistance. Indexical signs require experience of some sort and therefore belong to the second category. The third category is that of mediation, thought, and ideas about things. It is the category of the symbol. Peirce describes his three categories as follows: Originality is being such as that being is, regardless of aught else. Obsistence (suggesting obviate, object, obstinate, obstacle, insistence, resistance, etc.) is that wherein secondness differs from firstness; or, is that element which taken in connection with Originality, makes one thing such as another compels it to be. Transuasion (suggesting translation, transaction, transfusion, transcendental, etc.) is mediation, or the modification of firstness and secondness by thirdness, taken apart from the secondness and firstness; or, is being in creating Obsistence [italics Peirce].61 61

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 2. Elements of Logic, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960) 50.

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In this context, the neologism ‘transuasion’ is interesting. The prefix indicates that there is a dynamic relationship between all three categories. Object, interpretant, and representamen, the three dimensions of the sign, are mediated. Only through transuasion is symbolic semiosis possible. A-limitation as a model can be thought of in the same way. A form of transuasion exists between the three dimensions of subject, space, and sign that sets each of the categories in relation to the other two.62 These three dimensions do not straightforwardly translate into Peirce’s three categories or three main sign classes. There are, however, similarities: Since literary texts and other semiotic artefacts are analysed, both triads have the sign on top that serves as a means to represent the other dimensions. The object corresponds to the spatial dimension in the way that it is potentially real (a physical object). Yet the object in the sign is already a representation of a potentially real object precisely because it is part of a sign. Similarly, space is the prerequisite for experience, is constructed by experience, and is represented by language. The third part of Peirce’s sign, the interpretant, is not a person. Nevertheless, it is the idea or the meaning that is created by the sign in a person’s mind. This is essentially the pragmatic dimension and the unlimited nature of Peirce’s sign. A sign creates a new sign in the mind of the person who interprets the sign. Peirce introduces a final interpretant that hints at the possibility of a final signified, but this is actually only an ideal that all interpreters strive to fulfil, but that can never be reached. In a way, the subject is the interpreter of signs, but it is also the place where a-limitation takes place on a content level of the text. Subjects become signs to other subjects. This implication can be found in many of the Postmodernist theories discussed in the previous section (Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault, but also Derrida).63 Symbolic semiosis and a-limitation only work when all three dimensions are involved. Just as Peirce’s triad has stages of degeneration or restriction (index and icon), a-limitation can take a restricted form as well. In its lowest degree or in its restricted form, a-limitation is a characteristic of all literature, Romantic or Modernist, but different texts and cultures contain and produce different phenomena of a-limitation and different intensities. According to Peirce, a literary text would be symbolic, an argument, and a legisign, but it can also have characteristics of the other sign classes: if it strongly suggests a reference point in factual reality or its primary function is conative, the indexical nature of the sign becomes dominant; if it is syntactically organized in a way in which form

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Firstness, secondness, and thirdness generally depend on each other, see Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 1 Principles of Philosophy, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960) 179f. Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: “From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 50.

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mirrors semantic content, the iconic nature of the sign is foregrounded.64 In the same way, the different dimensions of a-limitation dominate in different texts. How differently the three dimensions of a-limitation manifest themselves can be seen in the three examples mentioned in this introduction. Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer discussed in the section “Three Romantic examples” foregrounds spatial a-limitation by seeming to organize the image into different boundaries and at the same time dissolving these boundaries. However, subject a-limitation and semiotic a-limitation are triggered by this spatial deterritorialization: the solitary monk faces uncertainties reflecting his own existence, and the spectator is confronted with an uncanny visual experience caused by the semiotic uncertainty of the boundaries (Kleist’s torn eyelids). In Emerson’s text, the horizon is an exterior boundary that reflects man’s permanent crossing of interior boundaries in a movement towards transcendence. The becomingeye-ball is a case of strong subject a-limitation against the background of spatial boundaries. To detect the semiotic a-limitation, the meaning of the horizon as a boundary zone that can only be understood by poets as well as Emerson’s general stylistic peculiarity which privileges inconsistency, have to be taken into account. The reader of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” experiences a more immediate form of semiotic a-limitation (ambiguity of meaning) as a result of the different layers and voices in the poem: which sign tells the truth, or does any? At the same time, the mariner is confronted with a combination of infinite space and existential threats that lead to his semiotic condition: the permanent reiteration of his liminal experiences (the permanent crossing of interior boundaries). Permanent reiteration is one of the most widely acknowledged features of both transgression (repetition of the transgressive action) and semiosis.65 Peirce defines the 64 65

See Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington, et al.: Indiana University Press, 1990) 46f. Together with the idea of unlimited semiosis, the iterability of language is a language feature Peirce and Derrida agree on. Derrida is broadly considered to be a successor to the Saussurean line of structuralist semiotics, but he was also influenced by Peirce. He ranks among those theorists who use binarity to reject and overcome it. In Grammatology, he writes, “Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign.” Derrida, Grammatology, 49. In the chapter “Meaning and Representation” in Speech and Phenomena Derrida writes the following about repetition: “A sign which would take place but ‘once’ would not be a sign; a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign. A signifier (in general) must be formally recognizable in spite of, and through, the diversity of empirical characteristics which may modify it. It must remain the same, and be able to be repeated as such, despite and across the deformations which the empirical event necessarily makes it undergo” (50). Positing repetition as the prerequisite of all signs also means that the difference between truth and reality, presence and repetition, has started to dissolve (see 51). Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, ed. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). This assumption is part of Derrida’s differance and his entire method of re-reading and deconstructing texts. Each sign leads to another sign in the system thereby constantly deferring meaning and denying the existence of a

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symbol as follows: “A symbol is a representamen whose special significance or fitness to represent just what it does represent lies in nothing but the very fact of there being a habit, disposition, or effective general rule that it will be so interpreted.”66 New symbols can be created from old symbols (“omne symbolum de symbol”).67 They turn into symbols if they are used by other speakers as well. The organic metaphor of growth applied by Peirce in this context fits his example from Romantic literature: “The symbol may, with Emerson’s sphinx, say to man, Of thine eye I am eyebeam.”68 The sphinx’s statement implies that she has to solve her own riddles, or, in our context, it means each symbol (riddle) originates in another symbol (riddle). When new symbols are created, the rules of the old symbols change. Thus one could say that symbolic laws are infinitely transgressed. Peirce writes, “In general, we may say that meanings are inexhaustible.”69 Chapter 2 discusses whether Romantic signs are already conceived as inexhaustible, as the preliminary look at “The Ancient Mariner” suggests, and what part other semiotic models such as notions of the divine or of original language play. In the present study Peirce assumes the role of a conceptual bridge. Historically he is situated between Romanticism and Modernism/Postmodernism (Peirce lived from 1839 to 1914) and he shares concepts with both periods: for example the Derridian notion of differance (he calls it unlimited semiosis) and the idea of the subject as sign. Methodologically he bridges the gap between the triad of sign, subject, and space that is merely implied in A Thousand Plateaus and my a-limitation model by complementing Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking with an explicit idea of contiguity thereby providing the missing element to the concept of Romantic a-limitation. His semiotic terminology also allows for a compromise between the heterogeneous and inconsistent semiotics in Romantic texts and the specific terms in Deleuze and Guattari’s chapters on signs. That is why I rely on Peircean (and where binary sign models are concerned on Saussurean) terminology to explain and compare the semiotics of different times and cultures.

66

67 68 69

transcendental signified. This is one aspect of the language of a-limitation: ultimate meaning or a stable signified that is assigned to each signifier (as it is in Saussure’s model) is not possible. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 4. The simplest Mathematics, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 359f. Peirce, Logic, 169. Ibid. Peirce, Principles, 174.

2. Magic Words? The Semiotics of Romanticism

Searching for magic signs In his poem “Wünschelrute” (divining rod) Eichendorff describes a case of semiosis, the process of creating and interpreting signs. The poem contains the elements of a triadic sign model (sign, object, and interpretant) and implies a pansemiotic view of the world: Wünschelrute Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen, Die da träumen fort und fort, Und die Welt hebt an zu singen, Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.1 (Divining Rod A song is sleeping in all things That lie dreaming on and on, And the world will start to sing, If you only find the magic word.)2

A magic word can make the world sing, which is already saturated with signs. The poem propagates a Romantic semiotics that seems to believe in meaning and a close connection between nature and the sign – in short that seems to believe in a natural sign. The belief in meaning (or the signifier as magic sign) is one pole of Romantic semiotics. The belief in magic words – which does not have to be a belief in man’s ability to attain truth – spans the nineteenth century. Though the focus changes, the issue is still debated in American Romanticism. Moby-Dick is full of magical hieroglyphics (see chapter 3). Walt Whitman’s 1891 edition of Leaves of Grass also contains residues of this belief. In “Good-Bye My Fancy!” he writes “May-be it is yourself now 1 2

Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006) 328. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations of German quotations are my own. I do not aspire to preserve the literary or poetic nature of the passages and therefore pay little attention to meter and rhyme. Instead, I try to translate as literally as possible. These literal translations shall only serve as an aid for non-German-speaking readers.

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really ushering me to the true songs”.3 The poet’s imagination seems to contain “true songs” or even magic words. Whitman has certainly lost his conviction that magic words can save the world as he tends towards new ways of signifying, but “Good-Bye My Fancy!” suggests that there is still a possibility of meaningfulness in the poet’s imagination. Even in contemporary theory, namely in Deleuze and Guattari, writing and magic are associated with each other – even if the goal no longer is to discover the truth about the world, or to make the world sing. In A Thousand Plateaus they suggest: “If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming”.4 The sorcerer at the margin of society can achieve new modes of existence that are no longer defined by conventional language or subjectivity. They transgress the sign. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari continue a Romantic tradition: the poet/writer/sorcerer possesses a magic power that can change the world. Eichendorff’s poem is indicative of a kind of semiosis that surpasses the limits of normal signification, denotation, or communication in a positive or transcending manner. Beyond this shining surface of positive semiotic a-limitation, however, there is a counter-current that, at times, turns into a dangerous maelstrom. The Romantic period offers an abundance of strange signs that cross the borders of normal signification. The positive power of magic words, however, is a promise that many texts break. Often a single reading does not suffice to understand a text such as Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin, or The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. The world is not singing; nature is neither an inspiring nor an improving signifying force. Instead, the world seems to scream and hurl signs at the reader. The moral transgressions in these texts find their semiotic counterpart in entangled tales, ambivalent viewpoints, unreliable fictive editors, doubtful narrators, vicious doppelgangers, and interpretative uncertainties. The dark dungeons and strange mountain landscapes display a symbolic landscape in which literal and figural meanings converge. At the same time, a constant reflection of reading processes through several textual and paratextual layers creates further potential for semiotic ambiguity. Explicit (self-)reflection of the reading process is a common feature in Romantic texts, particularly in Gothic fiction of the Romantic period. Written in the 1820s, both examples (Melmoth and Private Memoirs and Confessions) are late and highly perfected examples of this genre. Both revolve around a central character who has formed a mysterious pact with the devil and commits one sin after the other. Multiple narrators, fictive editors and manuscripts defer the meaning of the text. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is similarly structured. A tale within a tale within a letter challenges the reader to question the truth of the different narrations while accounting 3 4

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 422. Walt Whitman’s semiotics is discussed in detail in chapter 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 265.

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for their separate agendas. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also operates with three distinct textual layers (see Introduction to Boundaries). Multiple embedded tales and several paratexts offer different possibilities of reading the poem. This phenomenon of the embedded tale is not restricted to English Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and his novel Arthur Gordon Pym also consist of different textual layers. Unreliable narrators who are mad or who tell stories that document their own death are numerous in Gothic tales. Poe’s only novel is written by two persons: a fictive author and Pym himself. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels likewise operates with different voices and textual layers. These similarities could lead to the conclusion that this mode of semiotic a-limitation as the transgression of semiotic boundaries is indicative of moral transgression and of a specific genre while the positive, magical a-limitation (Eichendorff and, for example, Wordsworth) is connected to themes such as nature, love, and transcendence. Semiotic a-limitation is, however, not restricted to a specific Romantic genre or limited to certain thematic clusters. Nor can it only be found in a specific time period or in a specific country. Semiotic a-limitation is spread across the period called Romanticism in German, English, and American literature. Herman Meville’s “Encantadas” from the Piazza Tales, for instance, do not share the usual attributes of the Gothic genre. Yet, their narrative structures are very similar to the examples above and their self-reflexive thematization of semiotic uncertainties is even stronger. Even Eichendorff’s short poem about magic words has the potential to question meaning. The ‘you’ addressed in the poem has not yet found the magic word. The singing world remains a possibility, not a certainty. One could even argue that it might be impossible to find this magic word as things are dreaming on and on and thus will continue to dream. The German word ‘fort’ cannot only mean “on and on” but also that something is absent (as in ‘fort und da’). The ‘fort’ rhymes with ‘Wort’ implying that the magic word is and will remain absent.5 Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs (The Apprentices at Sais) is another example from German Romanticism that illustrates that Romantic semiotics is defined by both a belief in the magic word or meaning, and a constant deferral of meaning. Novalis wrote fragmentary novels and tales that depict the fantastic and the sublime in a different manner from the Gothic tales mentioned above. No monsters or dungeons occupy the books of early German Romanticism. Instead, they tell stories of young natural scientists, of poets, and above all of love. In Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs (1798–1799), a group of apprentices assemble around a master in Sais in order to decipher the language of nature, to recover original 5

For a detailed (deconstructive) reading of Eichendorff’s poem as the deferral and absence of meaning see: Daniel Müller Nielaba, “Vom Bedeuten des Literarischen. Verstehen, verschoben – Einige Grundsatzüberlegungen und zwei Exkurse zu Schiller und Eichendorff,” Kultur Nicht Verstehen. Produktives Nichtverstehen und Verstehen als Gestaltung, eds. Juerg Albrecht, et al. (Wien and New York: Springer, 2005).

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language. Sais as the metaphorical place for such a search is established in Schiller’s poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais” (“The veiled painting in Sais”), in which a young man displaying an exceptional thirst for knowledge travels to Sais where he finds a veiled painting. His enquiries about the hidden secret lead him to conclude that he will find the truth behind the curtain. In Schiller’s poem it is, however, forbidden to lift the veil until the goddess herself admits the spectator. Despite the warnings, the young man enters the temple by night and lifts the veil. The speaker of the poem admits that he does not know what the man saw: “‘Nun, fragt ihr, und was zeigte sich ihm hier?’ / Ich weiß es nicht. Besinnungslos und bleich, / So fanden ihn am andern Tag die Priester / Am Fußgestell der Isis ausgestreckt.” 6 (Now, you ask what was revealed to him here? / I do not know. Unconscious and pale, that is how the priests found him the next day / prostrate before the pedestal of Isis). Schiller’s young man does not live to tell the tale but dies of grief soon after.7 Novalis writes Lehrlinge as an optimistic answer to Schiller’s poem and its idea of deadly truth. His fragment ends before the ultimate secret is discovered, before the veil of Isis is lifted and the truth is perceived. A distichon written in 1798 as notes for Lehrlinge suggests a possible outcome: “Einem gelang es – er hob den Schleyer der Göttin zu Saïs – / Aber was sah er? Er sah – Wunder des Wunders – Sich selbst”.8 (One of them succeeded – he lifted the veil of the Goddess at Sais – But what did he see? He saw – marvel of marvels – himself.) Again, the truth is not easily accessible. The apprentice does not die, but he is thrown back onto himself in his search for truth. The Romantic elevation of the self combined with the Idealist notion that we cannot understand anything without reflecting our selves are expressed in this explanation. This is no easy answer, and the apprentices in the fragment merely approximate this unsatisfactory solution (since their search is broken off before the novel’s completion). They search in nature for signs and contemplate the language that keeps its secrets hidden. There are numerous figures in nature and one can only sense or guess “den Schlüssel dieser Wunderschrift” (the key to this magic writing).9 The form of the novel reflects this abundance of signs without concrete meaning: many voices are juxtaposed and the apprentice listens to all of them. Lehrlinge exemplifies the idea that the concept of hidden truth and multiple voices is not symptomatic of a specific genre.

6 7

8

9

Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 1, eds. Peter-André Alt, et al. (München: dtv, 2004) 226. Excessive thirst for knowledge as a Faustian characteristic is, of course, also a viable ingredient for a Gothic tale. The transgressor attempts to know the truth, which is reserved for God only; he has to resort to unnatural means to attain this knowledge and is therefore doomed to death or worse. Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe. Vol. 1. Das dichterische Werk, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Richard Samuel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 234. Ibid., 201.

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There are many textual forms and characteristics that could be described as semiotic a-limitation – all of them have one thing in common: the tension between the magic sign and the deferral of meaning. Since the signified seems to be there, but often remains behind a veil, the magic word is not an absolute concept and certainly not easily found. The figure of the veil ranges from the ambiguous use of the subjunctive by an unknown speaker to embedded tales told by unreliable narrators. To discriminate between different kinds of semiotic a-limitation will be one objective of the main part of this study concerned with detailed analyses of a-limitation in all of its three dimensions (sign, space, and subject). Chapter 3 analyses different semiotic a-limitation phenomena in literary texts while the theory plateau chapter 4 offers a tool box of theoretical approaches for the analysis of semiotic a-limitation. The present chapter focuses on the origin of semiotic a-limitation phenomena in Romantic texts by scrutinizing the philosophy of language. Where does a-limitation come from? Where do the multiple voices and multiple truths in Romanticism come from? The answer lies in the Romantic concept of the sign – or in the semiotics of Romanticism. Thus, this chapter analyses Romantic sign models – their structure and their function in the discourse of language origin. The last section of this chapter reads the semiotics of Romanticism against Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics because not only do they retain a belief in the magic power of the poet (as sorcerer), but also because they continue the attempt to explain language through its history.

Inspiration from the enemy: Locke, Condillac, Herder Locke’s arbitrary sign Semiotics is an ancient discipline reaching back to antiquity and Plato’s Dialogues. There are, however, several reasons for commencing an explanation of Romantic semiotics not at the very beginning but with Locke, and for pointing further back in history when the Romantic texts call for it. First of all, Locke uses the word ‘semiotics’ in the context of language philosophy. In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke divides the sciences into three types, one of these is “Σημєιωτική, or the doctrine of signs”.10 Since semiotics is mostly concerned with words, Locke equates it with logic: “the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others.”11 He proceeds to explain that we need to have ideas in order to think and that we need to have signs in the form of words in order to communicate these ideas to others. This extension of the 10 11

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Vol. 2, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover 1959) 461. (VI. xxi. 4) Ibid.

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dyadic sign model (things and thoughts) can be observed in many semiotic theories in Romanticism as well. The second reason for considering Locke before discussing the Romantics is that he and the thinkers of the Enlightenment influenced Romantic semiotics.12 The philosophy of language flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Kant and the Idealist tradition did not develop a coherent semiotic theory of their own.13 Consequently, Romantics had to mostly rely on and distinguish themselves from the rationalist, empiricist, and enlightened concepts. There are numerous sources of influence, among them are Leibniz, Michaelis, Rousseau, Madame de Staël, and Herder.14 One could also add Berkeley, Horne Tooke, Lord Monboddo, Wolff, Condillac, and, with a stronger focus on poetics than on philosophy, Lessing, Meier, Baumgarten, Sulzer, and Mendelssohn.15 Since the main concern of the present study is the semiotics of Romanticism, I will focus on three influential theoreticians, Locke, Condillac, and Herder, from whom I can trace a development to Romanticism and who 12 13

14

15

See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure. Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (London: Athlone, 1982) 120–45. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, “Language Theory and the Art of Understanding,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 5. Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 162. Those are the sources Mueller-Vollmer names. He also adds Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher. Sir William Jones should also be added because of his influence on the ‘quasi empirical’ study of oriental languages. See Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 127. My short overview of semiotics prior to Romanticism is indebted to the following studies that provide more detailed accounts of the history of semiotics. See David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860, James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Wellbery focuses more on semiotics and their aesthetic implications while the studies by Aarsleff trace semiotics through the history of linguistics (up to the late nineteenth century) and McKusick provides an extensive context for Coleridge’s semiotics. The tension between natural and arbitrary signs is also prefigured in the Enlightenment as Wellbery and Aarsleff (1982) show. Wellbery explains that there was an ambivalent notion of the sign in Enlightenment thinking: On the one hand signs allow for humans to exceed experience and to think. On the other hand they can lead to errors and demonstrate the limitations of the human mind (5). Language is defined as arbitrary in the Enlightenment, but there is also a divine intuitive part to semiosis that remains a telos. Wellbery calls this “progressive semiosis” (231). In his study of Lessing, he shows how the aesthetic value of signs expressed in poetry (or the idealization of the aesthetic as opposed to its rationalization) renders natural langue (i.e. poetry) a goal in semiotics, while the individual sign remains arbitrary. I will argue that this tension increases with the reintroduction of mysticism and concepts such as Adamic language in Romanticism. This is one way of defining the tension present in Romantic semiotics. Following Manfred Frank, Christoph Bode, for example, sees the tension between the sayable and the not yet sayable. See Christoph Bode, “Romanticism and Deconstruction. Distant Relations and Elective Affinities,” Romantic Continuities, eds. Günther Blaicher and Michael Gassenmeier (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1992) 139.

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also serve to illustrate a tension diagnosed for the Age of Enlightenment that becomes even more virulent in Romanticism and is the basis for Romantic a-limitation: the tension between arbitrary and natural signs.16 According to Locke, language is arbitrary: Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea.17

Locke’s statement can serve as the basis for the following exploration of semiotics. First of all, words are something that is “used by men”. This assertion corresponds with the idea that humans are social beings and that language is made for communication. This train of thought leads to semiotic models that include communicating persons. Charles Sanders Peirce is one of the first semioticians to discuss this idea. His sign model consisting of a triad between representamen (for example a word), object, and interpretant (the thoughts connected with the sign) suggests a thinking person who is engaged in a process of semiosis. The communicative situation is what makes a sign a sign in pragmatic theories. Pragmatic theories appear to have been anticipated in the explanations succeeding the quotation from Locke: “When a man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood…”.18 Furthermore, the speakers “suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate”.19 Pragmatic theories of the sign are the basis for narratological models in which narrator and reader communicate with each other. The Romantics understood narrators, fictive editors, and authors as being in a communicative situation with their readers. Of course, narratological theories are a more recent development, but their basis lies in early ideas of language as a means for communication. In Peirce’s theory we do not have a sender and receiver yet as we do in later theories based on Bühler or Jakobson, but the sign itself already has more than two sides. 16

17 18 19

Eva Fiesel also understands language philosophy in Romanticism as characterized by tension. She calls this tension an ambivalence between “Wesen und Erscheinung, zwischen Geist und Materie, zwischen Unendlichkeit der Verwandlung und Endlichkeit der Beharrung” that leads to a tension between interior and exterior language. Eva Fiesel, Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1927) 22. The opposition she posits is between creative and ideal Romantic ideas of language and real language. The opposition is between “konventioneller und wesenhafter Wortbedeutung” (32). The conventionality of language is, according to Fiesel, something Romantics want to overcome through poetry (37). Her study argues that Romantics also enjoy the arbitrary and conventional side of language (or at least are ambivalent towards it). I would like to attempt to bring together early approaches such as Fiesel’s and postmodern readings of Romantic philosophy. Locke, Essay 8. (III, ii, 1) Ibid., 9. (III, ii, 3) Ibid., 10. (III, ii, 3)

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In Locke’s case, the sign is not triadic, but an extension of the Saussurian dyadic sign. Locke calls words (or sounds) signs of ideas. This appears to be a dyad between the sound or signifier and the idea, meaning or signified. It sounds so familiar because it is very close to the famous dyadic sign model devised by Ferdinand de Saussure. The most common way of explaining Saussure’s model of the sign is to draw an ellipsis with a line in the middle. One half of the sign is the signified (a concept such as ‘tree’), the other half is the signifier (the word /tree/). The psychological relation between the two levels, i.e. that we think ‘tree’ when we see one and that we see a mental image of the tree when we hear or say the word, is associative and referred to as semiosis or signification.20 At first glance, the two sign concepts appear to be quite similar, but there are two major differences: meaning and structure.21 Meaning, according to Saussure, is a semantic structure. For Saussure, there are no ideas prior to words; everything that carries meaning is part of the semiological system: “In itself thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure”.22 In Locke, the ideas come first resulting in a need for signs to communicate these ideas to others. The relation between language and thinking is reversed. Throughout the history of semiotics, either language or thinking has been prioritized. While everything revolves around language in Saussure, Locke still believes ideas to be prior to language. The notion that we are determined by language and cannot think outside language is also relevant for Romantic thinking. The second difference is that Saussure’s entire sign theory operates solely with the two concepts idea/signified and word/signifier. The quotation from Locke’s Essay does not suggest a different approach, but in his third and fourth books of the Essay, Locke introduces a third aspect of his semiotics: objects. In the mind, objects are represented by signs. These signs are ideas. Consequently, this relation between objects, signs, and ideas is sometimes called a doubly dyadic sign model.23 In model one, ideas are signs of objects. In model two, words are signs of ideas. This is, however, not coeval with the triadic model developed by Peirce. While all three parts of the Peircean sign (represen20

21

22 23

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics. The Basics (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 18. Marcel Danesi, The Quest for Meaning. A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2007) 30. A minor difference is terminological: Locke only calls the word (signifier) sign and considers the idea separately. The idea is therefore not part of the sign but external to it. To Saussure and Peirce, the entire sign encompasses both the idea and the word. Locke does not think that ideas are also part of the sign. However, in everyday language, we still speak of signs as if only their manifestation as word or icon is the sign. Even Peirce sometimes calls his triad sign and sometimes only the representamen. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Duckworth, 1983) 110. See the summary in Winfried Nöth, Handbuch der Semiotik, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000) 20.

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tamen, object, and interpretant) are necessary and are determined by the representamen which mediates between object and idea thus creating more signs in the interpreter, Locke’s sign model is hierarchical or successive. This chapter explores Romantic sign models – which are often less systematically described than Locke’s model – and their tendency towards a more dynamic triadic or Peircean structure. Yet, Locke, who also argued that we are products of our experiences, does not deny reality. Although Locke introduces the object with a caveat, he acknowledges that they play a part in the semiotic process. This is fundamentally different from Saussure. If Saussure is taken seriously, the signifier is not even what we actually hear or say, but a sound image, “the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses”.24 Within the system of language (langue) the sign is situated independently from its actual use. The existence of a real tree is not important to Saussure: a linguistic sign is not a link between an object and a name.25 The second part of Locke’s quotation is concerned with this link, or the arbitrariness of signs. Locke stresses that the individual parts of the sign function “not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea”.26 Two things are important: First, Locke negates a natural connection between the signifier and signified and calls the relation arbitrary. Second, he bases this assertion on the argument that there would only be one language if there was a natural connection between word and idea. The problem of language origin that is touched upon here is of great importance for Romantic semiotics. The discussion of Locke illustrates why the discourse on language origin becomes so important in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century semiotics. Language origin can serve as an explanation for either the naturalness or, in Locke’s case, the arbitrariness of the sign. Arbitrariness is a key concept in Saussure’s semiotics as well. What does arbitrariness mean? In Saussure’s theory, the sign has no meaning by itself. Its value (meaning) is derived from its relation to other signs within the semiotic system. A sign is constituted through its distinction.27 This also means that the value of a sign is what the meaning of the other sign is not. The example Saussure gives is the meaning of French ‘mouton’ and English ‘sheep’. The value of ‘sheep’ is different because ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’ are opposed in English while there is no distinction in French. This oppositional principle of difference is not what Locke means with arbitrariness. The key phrase in Locke’s thinking is “voluntary imposition”. A free man chooses a certain sound for his idea. The reason for this choice is arbitrary. He could call a tree a 24 25 26 27

Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 66. Ibid., 66. Locke, Essay, 8. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 116–20.

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flower if he wanted to. There is no system of difference, but a choice made by a human mind. Of course, the process of making signs (either ideas or words) is not entirely random because signs have to function in thought processes or in communication.28 Since, however, there is no natural connection between words and ideas, words are imperfect and can easily be abused as Locke explains in chapters ix and x of his study. Remedies listed by Locke include using words according to conventions, not using words without knowledge of the idea that lies behind them, using definitions alongside abstract concepts, or relying on grammatical structures that are analogous to the mind. Only the last point hints at a type of natural sign. Enlightenment thinkers such as Wolff have similar conceptions. The act of reflection followed by the act of naming is the epitome of rationalist thinking and the prerequisite for philosophy, but naming is always also the source of error and an obstacle on the path towards truth. Thinking and naming are negotiated differently throughout the history of semiotics. Even Locke’s Essay does not supply a coherent answer: I confess that, in the beginning of languages, it was necessary to have the idea before one gave it the name: and so it is still, where, making a new complex idea, one also, by giving it a new name, makes a new word. But this concerns not languages made, which have generally pretty well provided for ideas which men have frequent occasion to have and communicate…29

Locke connects the notion of the a priori to the origin of language. Again, returning to the origin of language, to the first words spoken by men, seems to be a viable approach to explain how language functions. Romantics take up the discussion of language origin, which continues to inform Postmodernist understandings of the sign as evidenced by the exploration of the semiotics of A Thousand Plateaus later in this chapter. I will trace the discourse of language origin to Romanticism by looking at two more Enlightenment philosophers: Condillac and Herder.

Condillac: colliding models of language origin The French philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac formulates an answer, or, as he calls it, a supplement to Locke’s Essay in 1746 (1756 in English) and elaborates on the problem of language origin. Towards the end of the “Introduction” to his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Condillac justifies his extensive discussion of language: “I am convinced that the use of signs is the principle which unfolds all our ideas as they lye in the bud.”30 Therefore, language, epistemology, and human nature are closely

28 29 30

See Locke, Essay, 46. (III, v, 7) Ibid., 53. (III, 5, 15) Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. Thomas Nugent, ed. Robert G. Weyant (Gainesville: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971) 11. For a summary of Condillac’s language theory in general see: Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–

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linked together. The question of primacy inevitably leads to theories of language origin. Like Locke, Condillac argues that language was invented gradually. Locke assumes that God only furnished man with organs “fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words”31 which can be used as signs in communication. Clearly, Locke opposed the notion of Adamic, or original language, so the idea that God bestowed language upon Adam directly and Adam in turn used it to name all the animals by their proper name. He has, however, little to say on how we developed our language except that it started with particulars and then developed general terms that stand in for abstract ideas. Condillac’s discussion of language origin is far more extensive. His starting point is similar. In a footnote, he acknowledges God’s involvement in teaching the first humans a very basic and poor language that only fit everyday purposes.32 The idea that God originally endowed man with a primitive language, insufficient for philosophical enquiry, is not uncommon for Enlightenment thinkers, who need to include God in the equation somewhere but who are actually convinced that language was invented by man. The other train of thought present in the Enlightenment results from a frustration with the present state of language and searches for an original, natural language that is better equipped to communicate philosophical truths. The system of natural signs becomes the telos of the arbitrary language. Attempts to (re-)create such a language lead to inventions of logical languages or seek truth in poetry.33 This notion is already very similar to Romantic semiotics and can also be discovered in Condillac’s theory of language origin. Condillac abandons the presupposition that language was provided by God in favour of a narrative that demonstrates how two isolated children would start communicating with each other through cries and screams, before these are linked to specific objects or situations and lead to the invention of new sounds and significations: “The use of those signs insensibly enlarged and improved the operations of the mind, and on the other hand these having acquired such improvement, perfected the signs, and rendered the use of them more familiar.”34 A generalization of this narrative leads to the conclusion that language originated in emotive or sensational sounds turning into dance-like movements and gestures, into music and poetry. Thus original language is connected to poetry and music – a connection that the Romantics will later use to rediscover original language. Condillac calls this form of semiosis ‘language by action’. The step from this kind of language and its continued use to real language is not far: “In forming a habit of communicating to one another this sort of ideas by actions, mankind accustomed themselves to deter-

31 32 33 34

1860, 13–33. And on Condillac and Herder see Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 146–224. Aarsleff rediscovers Condillac’s essay for the history of language. Locke, Essay, 3. (III, i, 1) Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 170. See Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon. Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 173f.

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mine them; and from that time they began to find a greater ease in connecting them with other signs.”35 What follows is the invention of verbs, the other word classes and their arrangement into sentences. Then Condillac, following Locke, argues that, with the further development of language, it became necessary to have recourse to general terms: “When the use of those signs became familiar, their origin was forgot, and people were so weak as to believe that these were the most natural names for spiritual things.”36 Arbitrary language had been created. Condillac’s thorough consideration of the development of language leads to a different kind of semiotic model from Locke’s. Condillac distinguishes three classes of signs: 1. Accidental signs, or the objects which particular circumstances have connected with some of our ideas, so as to render the one proper to revive the other. 2. Natural signs, or the cries which nature has established to express the passions of joy, of fear, or of grief, etc. 3. Instituted signs, or those which we have chosen ourselves, and bear only an arbitrary relation to our ideas.37

Only higher operations of the mind (reminiscence, imagination, contemplation, and memory) are part of semiosis. As soon as we recognize accidental and natural signs, we are starting to develop them into arbitrary signs by using them habitually or conventionally. Condillac’s typology of signs partially concurs with Peirce’s taxonomy. Peirce’s sign has three dimensions (signifier/representamen, signified/interpretant, object/referent). In this typology of signs, each sign is defined by the relation of its parts and according to the three categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness). The typology is best understood as a Cartesian matrix with different categories. These trichonomies are interesting because they are also present in Condillac – or Condillac can be translated into Peirceian categories. The first trichotomy is concerned with the representamen and distinguishes between three signs: qualisign, sinsign, and legisign. In fact, many of the signs in the different categories are not truly signs because a sign is always a thirdness; that is why Walther calls them subsigns.38 The qualisign is a mere quality of a sign that is not yet a sign. It is just a perception. If it is embodied, it is a sinsign (the term comes from ‘singular sign’), and if it is conventional it is a legisign (from lat. lex, rule or law). That means, of course, that a word can be both sinsign (each ‘the’ in this text is a sinsign) and a legisign (there is just one legisign ‘the’ in this study). A work of art would be a sinsign because it is singular. There are correspondences between the accidental sign and the qualisign, which – merely a sensation of something or a perception (Condillac) – is not a real sign (or 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 239. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 51. See Elisabeth Walther, Allgemeine Zeichenlehre. Einführung in die Grundlagen der Semiotik, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979) 57.

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subsign). The sinsign or natural sign is perceived and understood as a sign by its receiver: “However [natural cries] will not be signs in respect to him the first time […] But when he has often felt the same passion, and as often broke out into that cry which accompanies it, both will be so strongly connected in his imagination, that he cannot hear the one without experiencing in some measure the other. Then it is that this cry becomes a sign”.39 Only when it is used again after some time does the natural sign cease to be natural and become arbitrary. Condillac’s natural sign is not exactly a sinsign, but it turns into a more complex sign (arbitrary or legisign) by continued conventional use. The other sign trichotomy that bears similarities to Condillac’s typology is related to the object. Its division is well known: icon, index, and symbol. The indexical sign is defined by its causal or consecutive relation to the object. A cry that is related to some kind of passion would be a classic example. Again, an index is not a fully developed sign. Only when we use it as one does it become a symbol that signifies in relation to law. The same rule can be applied to icons denoting through similarity. A pure icon conflates with its object, but all other icons (such as pictures of something, metaphors, or diagrams) already have a conventional aspect. That is why Eco argues that there are no real icons. We can only understand pictures, which differ from the objects they denote in many aspects (dimensions, material, depiction), because we are familiar with the rules under which these pictures are created and viewed.40 The term ‘natural sign’ seems to correspond to indexical sign in Condillac’s typology, but it is used differently in other eighteenth-century texts. ‘Natural’ or ‘motivated’ sign can also mean ‘icon’ to the extent that its naturalness is a result of the similarity between object and signifier. In his discussion of poetics and semiotics in the Enlightenment, Wellbery insists on the difference between natural signs and iconic signs, but has to admit that there are many sign theories that at least partially merge the two concepts.41 I will ascertain for each case separately which kind of sign is meant. The basis for this analysis will be Peirce’s trichotomy. The notion of the naturalness of signs is directly connected to the problems of language origin. In Condillac ‘natural’ means an expressive, emotive, or performative sign that is an index of the passion it denotes. But Condillac also includes arbitrary or symbolic signs and contingency in his theory of language origin. The preceding sections on Locke and Condillac show that sign models and questions of language origin are intertwined in the Enlightenment; in Romanticism they become even more important. They also show that there is an uncertainty concerning the definite origin of language and its naturalness, or arbitrariness. This tension further intensifies in Romanticism, culminating in the oscillation between magic words and arbitrary language systems. 39 40 41

Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 52. See Umberto Eco, Einführung in die Semiotik, trans. Jürgen Trabant, 9th ed. (München: Fink, 2002) 197–230. See Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon, 24–30.

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The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is a transitional figure between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as far as language origin is concerned because, particularly in his later work, he introduced poetic language into the discussion.

Herder: towards Romantic theories of language origin Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, which was influenced by Condillac, provides a detailed position statement on a question that became extremely important in later times.42 The question was so central that the Berlin Academy of Science published a call for papers in 1769 on the topic of language origin. Its members disagreed on the question of divine or human origin and hoped for a resolution. Herder’s prize-winning essay is written in favour of the human origin thesis, but also adumbrates the Romantic continuation of this debate. The first sentence of Herder’s treatise seems to answer the questions of language origin: “Schon als Tier, hat der Mensch Sprache.”43 (Even as an animal man already possessed language.) He follows Condillac in explaining how emotions are expressed in sounds: “Diese Seufzer, diese Töne sind Sprache. Es giebt also eine Sprache der Empfindungen, die unmittelbares Naturgesetz ist.”44 (These sighs, these sounds are language. There is therefore a language of emotions that is immediate natural law.) In contrast to Condillac, Herder designates those natural signs as language. His semiotic threshold is much lower because it includes nature. While, for Condillac,45 nature is something that has to be perfected by convention, nature is valued in Herder’s treatise. Nobody is alone in the world. Everybody is connected with nature and this awakens the sounds the individual can use as language. This Romantic view of natural language becomes even more apparent when Herder claims that the original sounds of nature are still audible in our languages today: “In allen Sprachen des Ursprungs tönen noch Reste dieser Naturtöne…”46 (In all languages of origin a remnant of these natural sounds resounds…) The rediscovery of these natural sounds will be the objective of Romantic semiotics. Herder, however, is not a Romantic. He continues in a very different manner opposing both theories of divine origin and theories of natural origin. Without reason, he contends, no arbitrary language could develop from natural sounds. Nature may have 42

43 44 45 46

See Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 374. On Herder’s connection to the semiotics of Romanticism also see: Heinrich Bosse, “The Marvellous and Romantic Semiotics,” Studies in Romanticism 14.3 (1975) 211–234. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden. Vol.1. Frühe Schriften 1764–1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag: Frankfurt a.M., 1985) 697. Ibid., 698. Condillac explains that natural signs are not enough because they do not allow for memory or reflection Condillac, Essay on the Origin 53ff. Herder, Frühe Schriften, 701.

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been a source for inspiration because it seemed to man as if nature was speaking to him, but this was not enough for language to develop. He directly criticizes Condillac’s tale of the two isolated children who start using signs for communication as if the words had somehow already been present. Herder tries to break out of the circular argument about the precedence of thought/reason/idea over language by saying that reason and language are mutually dependent.47 In order to refute the Adamic language theory, he even uses the respective Bible passages about Adam naming the beasts to say that it must have already been a human language. Otherwise our language would have to have angelic traits (which it does not). In Lyra, published several years later (1795), Herder reverses some of these early positions. Here, poetry originates directly from the divine.48 In this text, Herder celebrates poetry as original language coming from the “Naturlaute der Empfindung” (natural sounds of sensation) derived from imitation and turned into images.49 Herder moves towards Romantic notions of poetic language origin in his later text, but in his prize essay he still values rationality and, to a certain degree, abstraction. In his Abhandlung, Herder also questions Condillac’s conjecture that natural language, or language by action, was dance, music, and poetry, by arguing that this kind of language is far too sophisticated for the first humans.50 If there is some truth to this, it can be found in poetry, so not in the imitation of animal sounds, but rather in the expression of the human soul in sounds. The Romantics will follow Condillac’s point of view more closely. They ignore the rationality argument, but also value the idea of language as an expression of the human soul through poetry. Several Romantic poets claim to speak the language of man and claim to return to simple, musical, and natural language, but at the same time write very complex and abstract texts thus exemplifying Herder’s idea of the oscillation between reason and nature as the origin of language.51 Since Herder (like Locke) argues that reason is involved in language development, arbitrary or abstract language should be its outcome. He discusses the important question of how man could invent a language where there was no natural sound. The answer is: from his inner senses and emotions all of which have a counterpart in sound. Language is the material, the shape that is added to the thoughts and organizes the senses into a net, a system.52 This kind of system is not really arbitrary in the way Saussure’s language system is arbitrary. It is not even arbitrary in the sense that humans arbitrarily choose a sound for an idea, as Locke claimed. It seems as if there is a 47 48

49 50 51 52

See ibid., 718ff. See Johann Gottfried von Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden. Vol. 8. Schriften zu Literatur und Philosophie, 1792–1800, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998) 127. Ibid., 121. Condillac also briefly discusses the origins of poetry and music. See Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 227ff. See Herder, Frühe Schriften, 740f. Cf. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860, 151. On musicality and abstraction also see Fiesel, Sprachphilosophie, 23–42. See Herder, Frühe Schriften, 744–50.

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motivation, a natural analogy between thought and word in Herder’s theory. The older a language is, the clearer this analogy becomes so that the detection of emotions in the roots of the language is easier as well.53 Older languages are consequently less abstract. Herder agrees with Condillac and Locke on this point, but seems less inclined to celebrate sophisticated and highly abstract, grammatically complex language. The reason for this lies in the strange double function of language. On the one hand it serves the individual to express his own individual thoughts and can be further developed by individuals, families, and nations into distinct languages. On the other hand it generalizes thoughts and subjects the individual to the general. This is of course a genuinely Romantic problem: how are the one and the many, difference and unity negotiated? The Romantics, for whom the individual becomes more and more important, are aware of this tension and the tendency of language to dissolve the individual into the general. They react in different ways to this tendency of subject a-limitation ranging from the positive celebration of poetic power as the finite in the infinite to frustration with the lack of distinction and precision in arbitrary language. The semiotic problems I introduced in the previous sections guide the following exploration of the semiotics of Romanticism. The discussion of Locke, Condillac, and Herder shows that semiotics is a wide field that can be approached from many angles. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers are concerned with two issues. First, the question of the sign model: The dyadic sign model, similar to the one later developed by Saussure, is widely known, but there are first indications for an expansion in the direction of pragmatic models. How many parts does the Romantic sign have? Is it embedded in a communicative situation? Is it part of a system? Does it have a meaning? Does it refer to an extralinguistic reality? Second, the aporia between language as a means for communicating truths versus language as a faulty device that obstructs the truth. What is the potential of language in Romanticism? Can it be used to discover truths? Are there truths outside of language or the mind? And finally, the highly important question of whether the sign is arbitrary or natural or whether there are different kinds of signs. This question relates directly to theories of language origin. The arbitrary sign as the final stage of language development is acknowledged in all three texts but is evaluated differently. Thinkers become increasingly critical of it as we get closer to Romanticism.54 Is language considered to be arbitrary or natural in Romanticism? Is it bestowed

53 54

See ibid., 751ff. Aarsleff points out that the study of “language in England and Germany came to be pursued along widely diverging lines during the next generation [after Herder]”. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860, 42. I will argue that in Romanticism, however, there are certain tendencies or commonalities among thinkers concerning semiotics. Of course, English Romanticism never develops a notion of a language system as Novalis does, but the idea of correspondences, or the iconic (metaphorical or diagrammatical) is present in both lines.

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by nature, or by God, or is it invented by man? Which kind of language is considered to be the best?

Natural wonders or wild language games The third question of the previous section (is language natural or arbitrary and what is its origin) will serve to guide the discussion through the semiotics of Romanticism because the other two questions (the potential of either sign model or language to find and communicate the truth) depend on it. The assumption that language is natural and given by God automatically answers question number two: If language is God-given and we assume that truth also rests in God (as implied by a Christian belief system), this truth could be communicated and understood through divine language. When applied to the first question, about the sign model, this leads to the conclusion that there must be a signified for every signifier as God, being perfect, would only create a perfectly meaningful language. If, turning the argument around, language is arbitrary and was developed by humans, one can neither assume that it has access to some kind of truth (if there is indeed such a thing as truth), nor can one claim the existence of a signified for each signifier, or a particular sign model that is better fit to render comprehensible a wildly growing language. This line of thought leads to secularized concepts of languages, which became popular in the second half of the twentieth century and inform our present-day understanding of language and language philosophy. Of course, it is impossible to explain the state of language philosophy in one paragraph, but it might be possible to examine some of its tendencies by introducing a much debated term into the discussion: poststructuralism. For structuralism (i.e. Saussure), and even more for poststructuralism, the sign is part of a system that has no equivalent in nature and that does not mirror anything material. One basic line of thought of this argument (which is relevant for the theory of a-limitation) is the following: both structuralists and poststructuralists perceive language as a system. The meaning of elements in that system is determined by their differential relation to other signs. Poststructuralists radicalize this idea by taking it at face value: language is a system with neither boundaries nor center.55 This renders language uncontrollable (not controlled by speakers).56 Text is considered to be a sign, too, but not one with just one meaning. The idea of meaning expressed by an acoustic word is radically questioned. In Derrida’s concept of differance, the dyadic sign is broken apart and perceived as a chain of signifiers that differ from each other and constantly defer meaning. Each signifier only leads to an55 56

See Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler, Poststrukturalismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000) 29. See Manfred Frank, Was ist Neostrukturalismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1984) 35.

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other signifier but never to a signified. Meaning is no transcendental signified but only a result of traces.57 Derrida’s deconstruction of the dyadic sign is at the heart of poststructuralism, but in its essence very similar to Peirce’s notion of unlimited semiosis: the idea that the process of reading signs creates new signs in the interpretant, which then create new signs and so on. Endless chains of signification (without meaning) eventually lead to a frustration with language in contemporary theory (see this chapter’s final section on A Thousand Plateaus) that is not unlike Enlightenment and Romantic concerns. The belief in divine signifieds and the propagation of unlimited semiosis are two extreme positions taken regarding the three questions in semiotics identified in the previous sections. Naturally, Romanticism knew nothing of the radical ideas of poststructuralists, but, in retrospect, it is caught between the two extremes of the medieval belief in Adamic language and later ideas of unlimited semiosis and differance. This tension continues into Modernism as well as contemporary theory. The following sections will analyze this tension in exemplary texts from German, English, and American Romanticism starting with August Wilhelm Schlegel and finishing with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

August Wilhelm Schlegel: poetic language origins In his Briefe über Poesie, Silbenmaß und Sprache (1795), August Wilhelm Schlegel writes: 58 Die Sprache, die wunderbarste Schöpfung des menschlichen Dichtungsvermögens, gleichsam das große, nie vollendete Gedicht, worin die menschliche Natur sich selbst darstellt, bietet uns von dem, was ich eben sagte, ein auffallendes Beispiel dar. So wie sie auf der einen Seite, vom Verstande bearbeitet, an Brauchbarkeit zu allen seinen Verrichtungen zunimmt, so büßt sie auf der andern an jener ursprünglichen Kraft ein, die im notwendigen Zusammenhange zwischen den Zeichen der Mitteilung und dem Bezeichneten liegt. So wie die grenzenlose Mannigfaltigkeit der Natur in abgezogenen Begriffen verarmt, so sinkt die lebendige Fülle der Töne immer mehr zum toten Buchstaben hinab.59 (Language, that most wonderful creation of human poetic energy, the great, unfinished poem in which human nature is expressed, is a remarkable example of what I have just remarked. On the one side, reason renders it more usable for its purpose; on the other side, it loses part of its original force, which is grounded in the necessary relation between the sign of the message and its signified. Just as the unlimited qualities of manifold nature are impoverished and become stripped terms, so the living plenitude of sounds dwindles to become a dead letter.)

57 58 59

See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (London et al.: Routledge, 2002). I will discuss exemplary texts in detail. An overview that includes other texts by August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Böhme can be found in Fiesel, Sprachphilosophie, 40–82. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, “Briefe über Poesie, Silbenmaß und Sprache,” Kritische Schriften und Briefe I. Sprache und Poetik, ed. Edgar Lohner (Stuttgart, et al.: Kohlhammer, 1962) 145f.

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The focus or context of this quotation is different from the first example of semiotics taken from Locke. While Locke is chiefly concerned with epistemology, Schlegel’s object is poetry and meter. Language described as a poem that depicts human nature is undergoing two developments. On the one hand, reason improves it. Locke, Condillac, and Herder would probably agree with this assessment, since reason and language are closely intertwined in their theories to the point of reason being a prerequisite for language. On the other hand, language loses its naturalness by losing the relation between signifier and signified, because reason alters it. Whether the signified is an object or an idea (later comments define language as the signs expressing the language of the soul),60 Schlegel’s sign model is a dyad embedded in a communicative situation that consists of two dimensions. Originally, these are in a motivated relation to each other and lose this motivation with increasing abstraction. Schlegel illustrates this loss of motivation with a parallel development: nature atrophies into terms and sounds atrophy into letters. Increasing abstraction is part of Schlegel’s semiotics as well as his theories of language development. Nature plays a part in the origin of language, whether language is understood as accidental or as a compilation of natural signs (expressive cries in Condillac) or as sounds (Herder) with codified language as its end-point (abstraction, grammar). In Schlegel, the tone, however, has changed to a regretful lament of better times for linguistics. Schlegel offers a solution: rediscover the natural elements of language: Allein in den gebildeten Sprachen […] wittern wir kaum noch einige verlorene Spuren ihres Ursprunges [der Töne], von welchem sie so unermeßlich weit entfernt sind; wir können sie fast nicht anders als wie eine Sammlung durch Übereinkunft festgesetzter Zeiten [sic] betrachten. Indessen liegt doch jene innige, unwiderstehliche, eingeschränkte, aber selbst in ihrer Eingeschränktheit unendliche Sprache der Natur in ihnen verborgen; sie muß in ihnen liegen: nur dadurch wird eine Poesie möglich. Der ist ein Dichter, der die unsichtbare Gottheit nicht nur entdeckt, sondern sie auch andern zu offenbaren weiß; und der Grad von Klarheit, womit dies noch in einer Sprache geschehen kann, bestimmt ihre poetische Stärke.61 Only in the educated languages […] can we still detect traces of the sounds’ lost origin, from which they are immeasurably far removed; we cannot do much but consider them to be a collection of signs determined by agreement. Meanwhile there is hidden in them the deep, irresistible, unrestrained language of nature, unlimited in its restraints; it has to be hidden in there: only this makes poetry possible. He is a poet who not only discovers the invisible deity, but also knows how to reveal it to others, and the degree of clarity to which this can still occur in a language, determines its poetic force.

Schlegel would also call language arbitrary (arbitrary in the sense of conventional) but seeks to rediscover its original naturalness or motivation (the natural sign is a motivated sign in this theory) through its earlier stage: poetry. He wants to transform conventional signs into “natürliche und an sich bedeutende Zeichen” (natural signs that signify by 60 61

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 146.

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their own power). Yet, this does not imply a semiotic regression, but rather a new formation of language. The much debated and partially rejected notion that poetry is the origin of language is taken up by Schlegel and coupled – as is not uncommon in Romantic language origin theories – with music and dance. The poetics of this theory characterizes natural or motivated, i.e. musical, language as a hallmark of poetic quality. Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem “Wünschelrute” reads like a poeticized version of this proposition: “Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen, / Die da träumen fort und fort, / Und die Welt hebt an zu singen, / Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.” (A song lies sleeping in all things / That lie dreaming on and on, / And the world will start to sing, / If you only find the magic word.) If they are able poets, i.e. if they have some knowledge of the natural and original language that comes from nature and has the power to reactivate nature, humans can discover a song in nature that mirrors its objects (a motivated iconic sign). In Eichendorff’s poem, music is also the language of nature and the language of the poet. Schlegel arrives at the conclusion that music and dance are earlier forms of language. He does so through an assumption similar to Condillac’s theory: “Die Sprache ist entweder aus Tönen der Empfindung ganz allein oder aus Nachahmungen der Gegenstände ganz allein oder aus beiden zusammen entstanden.”62 (Language originated either from the expression of emotions or from the imitation of objects or from both.) The natural sign is therefore indexical (pointing towards its emotional cause) and iconic (imitating the object it refers to). Evidence for this proposition can be found in the language development of children. Resorting to an equation of phylogenesis and ontogenesis, he describes the crying of children as a first stage that must be accompanied by the imitation of parents and their natural inclination to sing. Since the greater part of the origins of language lie in passion, and music and poetry express passion best, they are consequently coeval with the very beginning of language and are as old as language itself.63 Music and poetry developed from dance, which is the pure expression of emotion, and its repetition. In the beginning they were one until poetry was separated from music. Schlegel is not the only Romantic who sees the origins of language in human interaction with nature and rejects the abstract and arbitrary sign developed by reason in favour of a return to the poetic origins of language. Although he draws on similar arguments to those of his predecessors (language acquisition, different national languages), his approach already displays the Romantic notions of free association and speculation. The question of language origin becomes a conceptual rather than an empirical one. The desire to retrace a historical process is replaced by the view that language development is an ongoing process that also occurs in the present.64 Romantic 62 63 64

Ibid., 151. See ibid., 157. See Fiesel, Sprachphilosophie, 45, Gustaaf Van Cromphout, “Emerson and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Language,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 30.1/2 (2003): 372.

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theory and Romantic semiotics are, precisely due to this tendency, not always expressed in treatises or essays naming the issue in their title. Examples of theory incorporated into fictional texts are Blake’s illuminated books, which, as Robert Essick shows, deal with semiotic problems without explicitly mentioning them.65

Blake’s poetry as theory of language origin Blake’s poems, particularly the shorter early ones, can be read as theories of language origin. An example of locating the origin of language in the expression of emotions is his “Laughing Song” in Songs of Innocence (1789). The poem opens with the anthropomorphizing of nature, which is a common device in Blake’s poetry: “When the green woods laugh, with the voice of joy / And the dimpling stream runs laughing by, / When the air does laugh with our merry wit, / And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.”66 In this first stanza as well as the first half of the second stanza, the sounds (voice, noise, sing) are dominated by the laughter of animated nature (woods, streams, air, hills, meadows, grasshoppers, birds). In the second half of the second stanza, the laughter of three females replaces the natural sounds: “When Mary and Susan and Emily, / With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He”.67 Finally, in the last stanza, the speaker appeals to the reader to join in the communal cheerfulness. While others see the origin of language in cries, Blake demonstrates that the sounds of laughter, understood as the indexical sign of joy (one of the most frequent words in the Songs), could also be the starting point of language. The entrance of humans into nature takes place in the middle of the poem. They seem to meld into nature’s joviality expressing themselves in their own sounds, “Ha, Ha, He”.68 While human language can be put down in writing and laughter can be transformed into something that amounts to a transcription of sound, the reader must trust the poem’s speaker to represent nature’s laughter. Inspired by natural sounds (as in Herder), humans start expressing their emotions in sounds (“Ha, Ha, He”). Interestingly, the verb that accompanies all natural noise is ”laugh”, while human sounds are expressed through singing in both instances. This could be read as the translation of natural sounds into natural signs which are musical. This reading would corroborate Schlegel’s assumption that early language was based on expression (joy) and imitation (of nature) and had melodious and rhythmic qualities.

65 66 67 68

See Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988) 11. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 11.

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Another poem in this cycle could be read as portraying the state of language after its birth from nature. The “Introduction”, often interpreted as introducing the bard or the maker of the illuminated book Songs of Innocence and the source of his inspiration, could also be read as the story of linguistic evolvement.69 In the first of five stanzas, each describing a successive stage in the process of language development, the speaker, a piper, walks through “valleys wild” “[p]iping songs of pleasant glee” when he sees a child on a cloud who addresses him.70 It is a scene set in a natural paradise where inspiration comes in the shape of the angelic. Language is in a state of innocence as well: language as music is a direct expression of the soul. Its rhythmic qualities are as natural as the hills and valleys of the Garden of Eden. The next stanza describes the codification and conventionalization of language. Condillac’s claim that natural signs need to be habitually used to become real signs (what later semioticians would call convention) can also serve to explain the two requests from the child as part of this process. First, the child calls for a particular song, a song about a lamb. Meaning is negotiated; naturalness vanishes in favour of imposition. Then the child demands the repetition of the song. A convention is formed that removes the sign further from its natural origin. Sounds are now no longer associated with something due to their expressive qualities but through the mechanism of recognition. The laughing child (first stanza) cries when the piper complies with his wishes. There are, of course, several possibilities for interpreting this apparent change of mood. Perhaps the child cries because the song is so emotional and beautiful, or the child cries because the story of the lamb, conventionally read as Jesus Christ, is a sad and emotional one. Still, the child could also cry because he is aware of having destroyed the original, natural, language through his demands. The next stanza is set in the stage that Schlegel describes as the unity between music and poetry and their subsequent separation. The child asks the piper to drop his pipe and “[s]ing thy songs of happy cheer”.71 The speaker complies and sings “the same again”. Once more, the music is repeated, but the song has lyrics now. Reason has found its way into original language and starts to erase its musical qualities. The child’s response is ambiguous: “While he wept with joy to hear”.72 On the one hand, language is more useful for many purposes, on the other hand, as Schlegel writes in his letter, something of its force is lost. Yet, the child completes the process of language atrophy by entreating the piper to stop moving (perhaps the remnants of the original rhythmic dance), sit down, and write his songs down in a book (just as Blake has done with his Songs of Innocence). The child, having completed his apparent task, vanishes. His departure could signify the departure of innocent, natural language, but it could also signify the demise of the indi69 70 71 72

See Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam, 128. Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 7. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 7.

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vidual. In light of the tension between individual expression and general abstraction as earlier and later states of language put forward in Herder’s prize-winning essay, the individual addressee has to disappear to make way for a greater audience which is capable of reading the conventionalized, institutionalized, codified language that is written down in the last stanza so that “[e]very child may joy to hear”.73 In the end, the reader is left with the letter that, to Schlegel, seems dead unless it is revived by the voice of the reader who resuscitates its original expressive content. Blake’s “Introduction” makes clear that the writing down of songs is problematic though not hopeless. In the simplicity and the musical qualities (catchy melodies, simple rhymes, and simple words) he seems to find an antidote to the evilness of arbitrary language.74 Like Schlegel, he celebrates a return to musical and prosodic language, which is also a return to innocence and to paradise. Blake reintroduces the religious dimension which the previous thinkers had carefully circumvented. Though extremely critical of dogmatic religion (as of dogmatic reason), Blake’s texts are full of religious allusions. Robert Essick shows that Blake’s semiotics is also influenced by religion and mysticism. Above all, Böhme and Swedenborg are sources for the return of Adamic language theories in Blake. Therefore, the idea of a solely natural origin of language is insufficient for Blake.75 The natural sign and the incarnational sign (the sign given by God and manifested in Jesus) need to be linked. Blake attacks the foundations of the natural sign theory in All Religions are One and in There is No Natural Religion where he argues that language is not just based on nature and experience. Since it can express desire, it must also have a poetic or prophetic character. “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God”,76 writes Blake in There is No Natural Religion. To see only with reason (‘ratio’) means to see only one’s self. Therefore, we must become divine as well, or God must become what we are. In Jesus, the incarnational sign, this desire is realized. In works such as The Book of Thel it becomes apparent that Blake criticizes the idea of language having evolved purely from nature.77 Thel, a virgin in paradise, consults different animals and objects about the state of death. The responses from speaking nature do not suffice to explain the concept to her. Consequently, the poet has to gain his inspiration not only from nature but also from divinity. Blake is notorious for his claim that his works were dictated to him by divine forces and are therefore prophecies. 73 74

75 76 77

Ibid., 7. Robert Essick impressively demonstrates this point in the interpretation of other poems such as “Infant Joy” and “The Lamb”. He reads the pleonastic pairs in “Introduction” to be pointing to a common language origin. He reads the entire volume Songs of Innocence and Experience as the recovery of original language. Particularly interesting are Blake’s preoccupation with the naming process and his allusions to an Adamic language. See Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam, especially 106–13. Ibid., 141. Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 3. For a more detailed interpretation see Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam, 124–26.

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He seems to be a Romantic who re-introduces religion into the equation of natural language origin. Yet, there is a problem in Blake’s own texts that reflects the tension between natural/motivated/incarnational sign and arbitrary/abstract/general language. On the one hand, Blake seems to call for a return to original and divine language, on the other hand, his poems become increasingly difficult to read to the point of total obfuscation. On the one hand, he rejects Locke’s celebration of general terms,78 while on the other hand he works with abstract figures that seem to be no “minute particulars”79 of individuals at all, but are rather philosophical concepts bundled into ambiguous signifiers like his famous Urizen. Blake seems to desire both: identity and truth, as well as difference and language games.80 Blake appears to advance a language theory in his texts, but the text itself counteracts his desire for a natural and divine language. While earlier poems perform this original or natural language (as Robert Essick shows), later works such as Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion are almost incomprehensible to the reader. Again, this tension between different semiotic theories and their literary execution is part of the larger and international concept of Romantic semiotics. To demonstrate this, the next section discusses Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs.

Novalis: between iconicity and arbitrariness In Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs as well as in his theoretical writings Novalis develops a fragmentary, in places even contradictory, language theory that oscillates between natural sign and hermetic language systems. The novel opens as a narrative: an apprentice relates his experiences in Sais. He begins by explaining that mankind’s history has left traces everywhere in nature. These traces, he muses, could be the key to magic writing, to the language of nature. So far, however, this key has not been found and the language of nature has only been briefly glimpsed in moments of epiphany or truth. Another voice joins the apprentice’s reflections and offers an explanation for the problem: “Man verstehe die Sprache nicht, weil sich die Sprache selber nicht verstehe, nicht verstehen wolle; die ächte Sanscrit spräche, um zu sprechen, weil Sprechen ihre Lust und ihr Wesen sey.”81 (One does not understand this language because language does not understand itself, does not wish to understand; it speaks true Sanskrit just to speak, because speaking is its pleasure and the essence of its being.) Friedrich Schlegel, who is not discussed in detail in this study, comes to an even more radical conclusion: not under-

78 79 80 81

See Essick on Blake’s Annotations to Reynolds ibid., 65. Blake’s call for minute particulars is from Jerusalem, Plate 55 “Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones” Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 205. See Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam, 206. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 201.

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standing something, the incomprehensibility of things, is something positive or even pleasurable – a final holy limit that reason cannot transcend.82 For Novalis, the reason why humans do not understand the language of nature, why they cannot go back to the original and natural language, is because language does not want them to. Language appears as a mysterious system that does not require the external world or humans to be alive. This is reminiscent of Saussure’s arbitrary language system that functions autonomously through relations. Even poststructuralist notions of never-ending language games come to mind when reading Novalis’s monologue which argues along the same lines:83 “Gerade das Eigenthümliche der Sprache, daß sie sich blos um sich selbst bekümmert, weiß keiner.”84 (Nobody understands the particular characteristic of language: that it is only concerned with its own self.) Language functions like mathematical formulae: “Sie spielen nur mit sich selbst, drücken nichts als ihre wunderbare Natur aus, und eben darum sind sie so ausdrucksvoll – eben darum spiegelt sich in ihnen das seltsame Verhältnißspiel der Dinge.”85 (They only play among themselves, expressing nothing but their own nature, and because of this they are expressive – because of this they mirror the strange relation of things.) This statement is informed by both the idea of arbitrary language systems and the idea of the motivated sign as bearing some kind of similarity to its object. In this case, the similarity rests on a concept that Peirce calls diagrammatical iconicity.86 A diagram does not imitate its 82

83

84

85 86

Friedrich Schlegel, “Über die Unverständlichkeit,” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Friedrich Schlegel. Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner, (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1967) 370. On the thesis that Romanticism, and Novalis in particular, anticipates poststructuralist ideas of differance and reflection see Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdoppelung. Die frühromantische Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), William Arctander O’Brien, Novalis. Signs of Revolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 80. Azade Seyhan pursues a similar line of argument. She states that “[Novalis’s] rudimentary theory of semiotics anticipates the modern understanding of sign systems” (40). She reads Lehrlinge as a crisis of representation that extends to the subject. There is no longer a primordial absolute self in Novalis, but a semiotic construction (41). Seyhan discusses Novalis in conjunction with Friedrich Schlegel and Kant. See Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents. The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992). Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol.2 Das philosophischtheoretische Werk. ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 438. Ibid., 438. Wellbery mentions that in Lessing poetry can be understood as a diagrammatic icon, but does not discuss this notion in detail. My argument that diagrammaticity can function as a solution to the tension between arbitrary and natural signs builds on this observation. See Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon, 202. Diagrammatology or diagrammatics has been further developed in recent years as part of the iconic turn. For an overview of recent research and an application of Peirce’s diagrammatic sign and reasoning processes see Matthias Bauer and Christoph Ernst, Diagrammatik. Einführung in ein kultur- und medienwissenschaftliches Forschungsfeld (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010).

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object in the way a painting does. Instead of representing an image, it depicts relations between aspects. Novalis’s sign is both iconic and arbitrary. Novalis is not unfamiliar with the concept of arbitrariness. Having read Locke, Condillac, Herder, and others, he was well informed about contemporary debates.87 If language is arbitrary, how does this proposition translate into a concrete sign model? Novalis sketches a semiotic theory in his notebooks, particularly while studying Fichte’s thoughts on language origin.88 Novalis’s sign model has at least three dimensions: Verhältniß des Zeichens zum Bezeichneten. // Beyde sind in verschiednen Sfären, die sich gegenseitig bestimmen können. // Das Bezeichnete ist eine freye Wirkung [,] das Zeichen ebenfalls. // Gleich sind sie sich also im Bezeichnenden – sonst völlig ungleich – aber auch dis nur für den Bezeichnenden – beyde sind in Beziehung auf einander blos im Bezeichnenden. // […] [Sie] sind für einen zweyten Bezeichnenden völlig getrennt. // Das Denken kann aber nur einem zweyten Bezeichnenden, so wie alles von außen, nur d[urch] d[en] Raum, mittelst einer Anschauung, oder eines Gefühls mitgetheilt werden. […] // Der erste Bezeichnende braucht also nur, um sich mitzutheilen, solche Zeichen zu wählen, die eine in dem homogenen Wesen des 2ten Bezeichnenden begründete Nothwendigkeit der Beziehung auf das Bezeichnete haben.89 Relation of the sign to the signified. // Both are in different but interdependent spheres. // The signified is the free effect, the sign is too. // They are only the same in the signifying agent – otherwise they are totally different – but only to the signifying agent – both exist in relation to each other only in the signifying agent. // They are separated entities to a second signifying agent. // But thoughts, as all things exterior, can only be related through space via a representation or a feeling to a second signifying agent. // The first signifying agent therefore must only choose signs which have their reason for the relation between signifier and signified in the homogenous being of the second signifying agent.

Novalis’s sign consists of several identifiable components: sign (or signifier which is material as Novalis explains in the Freiberger Studien90), signified or referent, and a signifier who uses the sign. Apparently, the signifier is similar to an active sign user, the interpretant, who sensibly connects what would otherwise be arbitrary. Communication is part of semiosis because there is a second sign user, but Novalis admits that their mutual understanding is not at all likely if signifier and signified are only connected in their minds. Communication depends on choosing the signs that other people also understand. There are two contradictory qualities of the sign: freedom (arbitrary choice in the sense of Locke) and necessity in respect to all sign users. Novalis merges the two characteristics and calls them free necessity. This terminology triggers several questions: What does a semiotics of free necessity look like? Why are two people using the same sign(s)? 87 88 89 90

O’Brien, Novalis. Signs of Revolution, 79. I have decided not to elaborate on Fichte’s position as Novalis’s discussion suffices for my argument. On Novalis’s Fichte Studies see ibid. Novalis, Das philosophische Werk, 12f. Ibid., 468.

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The answer lies in a very structuralist solution: “Jedes verständliche Zeichen also muß in einem schematischen Verhältniß zum Bezeichneten stehn. […] Das Schema steht mit sich selbst in Wechselwirkung. Jedes ist nur das auf seinem Platze, was es durch die andern ist. […]”91 (Every intelligible sign, then, has to be schematically related to the signified. The schema is determined by its interrelations. Every element is only in its place by virtue of the other elements.) This concept sounds almost like Saussure’s idea of negative differentiation: a sign only means something because it does not mean anything else. It is determined by its position within a system. While it is not exactly clear who does what in Novalis’s system, it can be assumed that this system, being both free and necessary, possesses a certain autonomy that makes meaning possible through relations. Arbitrariness and self-reflexivity are only one side of the debate. Novalis embodies the tension by incorporating both sides into his works. Die Lehrlinge illustrates this tension by assigning different semiotic positions to different voices. One of the apprentices propagates the notion of language as a force that resists interpretation. After his case for language games has been heard, another voice speaks up: “Keiner Erklärung bedarf die heilige Schrift. Wer wahrhaft spricht, ist des ewigen Lebens voll, und wunderbar verwandt mit ächten Geheimnissen dünkt uns seine Schrift, denn sie ist ein Accord aus des Weltalls Symphonie.”92 (Holy Scripture requires no explanation. He who speaks truthfully is full of eternal life and his writing seems miraculously related to real secrets because it is a chord from the universe’s symphony.) This position is closer to Schegel’s idea that there are residues of naturalness and true meaning in language, but that they need to be discovered by someone who can understand the language or who has a sense for its musical/original qualities. The apprentice assumes that his teacher is such a person. The apprentice’s teacher has himself been educated through the observation and understanding of nature until he finally saw connections everywhere. What has since happened to the teacher remains a secret. The teacher is not someone who shares his knowledge freely. Yet, he trusts an inexperienced child to hold his lessons. This could be read as a further indication that primordial language is the language children understand and speak. The analogy of phylogenesis and ontogenesis is part of language origin theories. The apprentice has neither advanced as far as the teacher nor has he regressed into childhood: “So wie dem Lehrer ist mir nie gewesen. Mich führt alles in mich selbst zurück.”93 (I have never felt like the teacher. Everything leads me back to myself.) As suggested by the distichon about Sais: the search for truth sometimes ends in one’s own self. It seems almost as if the apprentice suffers from the same problem Blake describes in There is No Natural Religion. One must see the infinite to really understand the world. This means establishing a connection with the divine, or becoming-divine. 91 92 93

Ibid., 14. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 201. Ibid., 203.

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Reaching this transcendent state is exceedingly difficult because over time humans have started to denote objects by convention and this process, which is mirrored in a splitting, a separation, or a division of the inner self, leads to more division and more arbitrariness. Man has lost his ability to understand.94 Novalis pursues a similar argument in his theoretical texts: “So ist die Welt in der That eine Mittheilung – Offenbarung des Geistes. Die Zeit ist nicht mehr, wo der Geist Gottes verständlich war. Der Sinn der Welt ist verlohren gegangen. Wir sind beym Buchstaben stehn geblieben.”95 (The world is in fact a message – revelation of the spirit. The time has passed when God’s spirit could be understood. The meaning of the world has been lost. We have reached a dead end with the letter.) While Novalis agrees with Schlegel on the endpoint of language development, he also adds a metaphysical dimension to his argument that departs more radically than Schlegel’s argument from rationalist, sensualist, and Enlightenment ways of thinking. That is why, given the initial simplified division between the two positions, Novalis cannot but question arbitrariness: a religious dimension necessarily leads to a belief in meaning (even if that meaning is not attainable by ordinary humans). In Das allgemeine Brouillon Novalis reflects on arbitrariness and comes to the conclusion that semiosis has to involve mimesis or association: “Die sog[gennanten] willkührlichen Zeichen dürften am Ende nicht so willk[ührlich] seyn, als sie scheinen – sondern dennoch in einem gewissen Realnexus mit dem Bezeichneten stehn. (Instinktartige Sprache – Ausartung des Instinkts – conventionelle Sprache – diese soll wieder instinktartige, aber gebildete Sprache werden.)”96 (In the end, the so-called arbitrary signs are not as arbitrary as they seem. There has to be some nexus, some relation, to the signifier. (instinctive language – transformation of instinct – conventional language – this should be an instinctive language again, but an educated one).) As in Lehrlinge, Novalis assumes that there was once a motivated or natural language that was lost in the process of language sophistication and that has to be rediscovered without absolute regression. Again, there is a striking resemblance to Blake who also feels that paradise was lost through the invention of conventional language and that we cannot go back to paradise in the same mode of innocence because we have heard and spoken arbitrary language. There is a vague communal notion of original language, something liquid, formless, thin, and floating.97 This notion seems to be present in all humans as energy flows through us, but our belief in the material, our belief in structure, is utterly in the way. The ideal solution seems to be to rid oneself of order, to become a body without organs (as Deleuze and Guattari call it), to dissolve in space, to connect with other bodies without organs, to transcend space and matter, and arbitrary language appears to be an 94 95 96 97

Ibid., 205. Novalis, Das philosophische Werk, 383. Ibid., 540. See Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 206.

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ideal solution. Romantics (and Deleuze and Guattari), however, do not see arbitrary language as an ultimate goal. Nor do they want to return to primordial languages (neither do Deleuze and Guattari). Instead a new natural language is needed. Since nature is the inspiration for the first musical or poetic language, Novalis arrives at a similar conclusion to Schlegel. A group of travellers arrives at Sais, and they have come there seeking original language, which was a language of music: Ihre [der alten Völker] Aussprache war ein wunderbarer Gesang, dessen unwiderstehliche Töne tief in das Innere jeder Natur eindrangen und sie zerlegten. Jeder ihrer Namen schien das Loosungswort für die Seele jedes Naturkörpers. Mit schöpferischer Gewalt erregten diese Schwingungen alle Bilder der Welterscheinungen…98 The language of ancient peoples was a wonderful song whose irresistible sounds deeply penetrated nature, and dissected it. Each of their names seemed to be the password for the souls of all natural bodies. With their creative power these vibrations excited all images of wordly beings…

The ancient cultures had knowledge of the natural signs and their music – but what can the apprentices do to regain that knowledge? According to Novalis, one either has to explore nature (as the apprentices do) or explore its secrets through poetry: “Daher ist auch wohl die Dichtkunst das liebste Werkzeug der eigentlichen Naturfreunde gewesen, und am hellsten ist in Gedichten der Naturgeist erschienen. Wenn man ächte Gedichte liest und hört, so fühlt man einen innern Verstand der Natur sich bewegen, und schwebt, wie der himmlische Leib derselben, in ihr und über ihr zugleich.”99 (This is why poetry has been the most cherished tool of the true friend of nature and why the spirit of nature can best be seen in poetry. When one reads and listens to true poems, one feels the movement of the inner mind of nature and, like the heavenly body itself, floats simultaneously within it and above it.) The difference between nature and man, between language and meaning, between subject and object is suspended and the state of floating achieved in the moment when true poetry is read. The difference between God and man is similarly blurred as man becomes “himmlisch” (divine). Trying to understand nature (as a non-divine being) can be dangerous. Its sublime character can harm man, make him dizzy, and tear him away into the darkness of the night.100 To become like nature, to dissolve the divine and the human into pure forces – that is the spirit of nature. Does the solution to this problem, after all, lie in one’s own self? There are many voices in Lehrlinge and they suggest different things. They are an expression of uncertainty and confuse the reader as much as the poor apprentice who listens to all of them. The embedded tale of Rosenblüthchen and Hyacinth does not offer a new solution: love, the connection of the self with the other. Still, the apprenti98

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 206. 100 See ibid., 210f. 99

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ces cannot understand the language of nature when they have to depart: “O! daß der Mensch, sagten sie, die innre Musik der Natur verstände, und einen Sinn für äußere Harmonie hätte. Aber er weiß ja kaum, daß wir zusammen gehören, und keins ohne das andere bestehen kann. Er kann nichts liegen lassen, tyrannisch trennt er uns und greift in lauter Dissonanzen herum.”101 (O! That man, they said, could only understand the internal music of nature and have a sense for external harmony. But he scarcely knows that we belong together and that one cannot exist without the other. He cannot let things be, like a tyrant he separates us, creating dissonances.) Again the division of subjects is equated with dissonances and the inability to understand nature and natural signs. If man would stop seeing only borders and surfaces, he would understand the infinite game and join with others instead of perpetuating the division. A state in which the outer world (sign) is transparent and the inner world (signified) manifold is attainable. The conversation is continued (despite the departure of the apprentices) and again turns to the poet: Nur die Dichter haben es gefühlt, was die Natur den Menschen seyn kann, […] und man kann auch hier von ihnen sagen, daß sich die Menschheit in ihnen in der vollkommensten Auflösung befindet, und daher jeder Eindruck durch ihre Spiegelhelle und Beweglichkeit rein in allen seinen unendlichen Veränderungen nach allen Seiten fortgepflanzt wird.102 (Only the poets have felt what nature can be to man […] and here, too, it can be said that mankind is in a state of most perfect dissolution in them, and that therefore every impression is reflected in all directions, in the purity of its infinite transformations, by their mirror brightness and flexibility.)

This is an instance of the positive disintegration of the subject that expands and enters into a mode of becoming. Once again, including Novalis’s theoretical works may help to support the argument of this particular speaker: “[Des Dichters] Worte sind nicht allgemeine Zeichen – Töne sind es – Zauberworte, die schöne Gruppen um sich her bewegen. […]”103 (The poet’s words are not general signs – they are sounds – magic words which move beautiful groups around them). The poet speaks magic words that appear as insanity to others. Yet, he could do more: [M]ir scheinen die Dichter noch bei weitem nicht genug zu übertreiben, nur dunkel den Zauber jener Sprache zu ahnden und mit der Fantasie nur so zu spielen, wie ein Kind mit dem Zauberstabe seines Vaters spielt. Sie wissen nicht, welche Kräfte ihnen unterthan sind, welche Welten ihnen gehorchen müssen.104 (It seems to me that poets do not exaggerate enough; they only dimly sense the magic of that language and play with fantasy like a child toying with his father’s wand. They do not know what powers they possess, what worlds must obey them.)

101

Ibid., 218. Ibid., 222f. 103 Novalis, Das philosophische Werk, 322. 104 Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 223f. 102

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The fragmentary novel finishes with a focus on the natural scientist and leaves the poet to muse on how to accomplish his task. Novalis’s note in the conclusion of the fragment suggests the arrival of Jesus and ultimately the building of a New Jerusalem as well as the appearance of ancient divinities. This is very similar to the ending of Blake’s last great illuminated book, Jerusalem, in which Jesus, who is the unified sign that is both signifier and signified at once, rebuilds the city, returns the emanation, and unites the world with paradise. A provisional conclusion based on this reading of Novalis points to an increase in the tension between arbitrary and natural language through the addition of the element of infinite games on the one side and the reintroduction of the idea of a divine sign that is not really separate on the other side. The fragment also leaves the question open as to whether the poet can really find his way to natural language or whether he has to become divine or needs divine assistance. The poet seems to be able to cross several interior boundaries, but the new natural language remains off limits (beyond an exterior boundary). What McGann sees as part of Romantic ideology, the idea that the poet can solve all problems, has to be treated with caution. It is a motif that pervades Romantic poetics not only in Germany, but also in England and America. The following sections will explore its potential for solving the tension between the magic sign and the arbitrary system.

Coleridge: natural language as creative language Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s early concerns with language philosophy were informed by his engagement with Plato’s Cratylos with his contemporary, Lord Monboddo.105 Like Schlegel and Novalis, he connects naturalness to poetry and its aesthetic evaluation. In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes of his early years and his first poetic influences. He praises Bowles for his poetry because it is “so natural and real”106 in contrast to other modern English poets who write simple thoughts in “language the most fantastic and arbitrary”.107 For Coleridge, ‘natural’ does not mean everyday language actually used by real people, the language preferred by Wordsworth according to the “Preface” of the Lyrical Ballads. The language of the poet can, and in some cases must, deviate from quotidian language use. Its naturalness derives from its “proximity to natural objects” and the way 105

For details on the English debates and the particular influences on Coleridge’s thinking as well as a more extensive discussion of Coleridge’s language philosophy see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language. 106 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions and Two Lay Sermons (London: Elibron Classics, 2004) 7. Also see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 13ff. 107 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 11.

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the expression must result directly from the poet’s object.108 The material and intellectual world are connected through the natural sign that reveals a “primordial motivation of the sign by the thing signified”. Indicators of primordial motivation can be rediscovered through the study of infant language and in poetry that conveys feelings through the “precise deployment of phonetic elements”.109 The metrics and sounds of poems should mirror the experience described in the poem. These ideas are similar to Schlegel’s notion of poetic clarity as an indicator of natural language. Another element of Coleridge’s semiotics is the idea that a word’s natural meaning can be derived from nature as a divine text created by God. In his 1795 lectures he writes: “The Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of himself. In Earth or Air the meadow’s purple stores, the Moons mild radiance, or the Virgins form Blooming with rosy smiles, we see pourtrayed the bright Impressions of the eternal Mind.”110 We need to reproduce creation in us by making use of our imagination: “The noblest gift of Imagination is the power of discerning the Cause in the Effect a power which when employed on the works of the Creator elevates and by the variety of its pleasures almost monopolizes the Soul. We see our God everywhere – the Universe in the most literal Sense is his written Language.”111 The idea of universality or harmony, which is also inspired by Coleridge’s travels to Germany and his excursions into German Idealism,112 is reminiscent of Novalis’s doctrine of natural or divine language which presupposes harmony between signifier and signified. It is also reminiscent of his assumption of homogeneity between the minds of men that renders understanding possible. Coleridge writes in his notebook: “[W]ords are not mere symbols of things & thoughts, but themselves things – and that any harmony in the things symbolized will perforce be presented to us more easily as well as with additional beauty by a correspondent harmony of the Symbols with each other.”113 Coleridge’s idea of harmony or correspondence can also be understood as diagrammatical concept. There are several diagrammatical relations in Coleridge’s semiotics. First of all, the symbol as sign is what Peirce would call an icon because it has a motivated relation to 108

See McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 15–18. Ibid., 17. 110 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, eds. Kathleen Coburn, et al. (London: Routledge, 1971) 94. Also see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 22–32. McKusick also illustrates Berkeley’s influence on Coleridge. 111 Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, 338f. 112 See McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 54–61. 113 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1808–1819. Vol. 3, ed. Kathleen Coburn, (London: Routledge, 1973) 3765. Also see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 78–81. McKusick ascribes Coleridge’s development of the concept of harmony to Leibniz. 109

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its referent.114 A signifier represents objects and thoughts alike, not just thoughts as Locke argues. The system of words diagrammatically mirrors the harmony of nature as divine creation. There is no absolute identity between objects and signs but a correspondence. This notion is consistent with Coleridge’s thoughts on things and objects in general, which are always connected to the thinking subject which in turn is connected to God.115 There is in Coleridge’s writing, as is the case for most of the thinkers discussed in this chapter, also an awareness of the fallen state of language in its everyday use. Coleridge compares the frequently used “arbitrary marks” to a “smooth market-coin” that has been worn out by use.116 Besides Bowles, and to a certain extent Wordsworth, he sees Shakespeare and Milton as the poets who are able to overcome arbitrariness by using individual and creative words that arise from reflection and imagination. The tension between the universality of language (as a prerequisite for understanding) and individual expression (of individual feelings and true poetry) is also part of Coleridge’s musings on language. Such a language theory seems to correspond with Novalis or Blake, but Coleridge partially rejects the Adamic language hypothesis in his late work, Logic, calling man a silent animal who spoke only as much as necessary in the beginning (this statement is reminiscent of Condillac’s footnote that grants God but little involvement in the process). Yet, Coleridge also refers to the Bible in search of the original language looking for it in the three sons of Noah who founded three branches of languages.117 Language then evolved from a mere flow of words into a grammatical system. In Logic he also turns to the question of language and truth. Can language lead to the truth, or represent the truth? Since Coleridge’s language philosophy changes over time, there is no satisfactory answer to this question.118 On the one hand, language and mind are in correspondence; on the other hand, Coleridge later argues that language developed slowly, he even focuses extensively on grammar and argues that the poet’s best language is that of the imagination, i.e. a language coming from the human mind. The answer connects both positions without completely resolving the tension: 114

“Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language […] On the other hand a Symbol […] is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial. […] It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 6. Lay Sermons, eds. R. J. White and Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge, 1972) 30. 115 See Chapter XII in Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 130–33. Kathleen Wheeler argues that Coleridge, despite all influences, is not an idealist but a predecessor of pragmatism, who does not see subject and object as a unity but as a continuity. See Kathleen M. Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 150–62. 116 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 212. Also see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 115ff. 117 McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 127ff. 118 See ibid. on this.

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grammatical structures are innate and therefore we construct our world through language.119 Therefore, there should not be a truth outside of our language (or our selves) and yet, there is a universal harmony between things. Just like the Idealists and the German Romantics, Coleridge cannot solve the tensions in language philosophy. Even Fichte, who argues that the object and the subject are integrated into the subject (Ich) and that the subject posits itself by a free act of selfrealization, encounters chicken-and-egg-problems and ultimately relies on a universal principle that enables the process of self-realization. The tension between naturalness and arbitrariness, individuality and universality, subject and object seems to lessen only with the empowerment of the poet.

Shelley: the unacknowledged legislator as solution? While Coleridge’s remarks are scattered throughout his notebooks and lectures, his autobiographical works, his sermons, and his philosophical oeuvre, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote one text that provides a coherent argument and allows for a close reading of some of the important signposts in the semiotics of Romanticism. In 1821, during the height of what could be called British Romanticism, Shelley writes A Defence of Poetry that is not published until 1840. It reflects the shift of the debate on language and language origin towards a Romantic solution: the valorization of the poet. “Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination’: and poetry is connate with the origin of man.”120 This prerequisite sounds familiar. Coleridge’s and Blake’s insistence on poetic imagination resonates in this quote as do Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thoughts on the poetic and musical origin of language. Unsurprisingly, Shelley’s history of language describes how savages (or, in the familiar analogy, children) express emotions through objects and then through language, gesture, and pictorial imitation to other members of society. Language is immediately a means of communication, its media are “the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony”.121 “In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order.”122 I do not claim that Shelley knew Schlegel’s texts, but they seem to agree on the twofold origin of language in expression and in imitation, and on its successive development which relies on prosody. Early language is metaphorical; it is natural and iconic. What does this mean: natural and iconic?

119

Ibid., 141–48. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Authoritative Texts, Criticism, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd. ed. (New York: Norton, 2002) 511. 121 Ibid., 511. 122 Ibid., 511f. 120

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Peirce’s iconic sign is divided into three classes: images (among them Shelley’s original means of communication), metaphors (similarity to things) and diagrams. Novalis’s and Coleridge’s writings imply that the relations of things are mirrored in language. Shelley calls this relation metaphor: “Their [poets’] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts…”123 This description is similar to the worn out coin (Coleridge), a collection of signs set by agreement (Schlegel), abstract or general terms (Locke), or to what is still called a ‘dead metaphor’. The word ‘bottleneck’ is one such dead metaphor. It is actually a metaphor that describes the upper part of the bottle in relation to its body as a neck. The word is a motivated compound at one time coined through metaphorical relations of similarity. Through continued use, its iconic origin has been forgotten and it has become arbitrary. Shelley’s solution to abstraction follows immediately: “and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.”124 Again, the poet hurries to the rescue. This time, however, he seems to not only have the power to resolve (Novalis) but also to use it: “to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.”125 The poet is the master of a triadic sign consisting of the object (existence), its mental interpretant (perception), and the representamen (expression). At first glance, one could argue that this sign model is, similarly to Locke’s, the model of two dyads (objectthought; thought-word). In the strict or narrow sense of poetry, Shelley stresses the relation between thought or imagination and expression, and designates language as the supreme material expression since it is “arbitrarily produced by the imagination”.126 Shelley further elaborates his general sign model: “Sounds as well as thoughts have relations, both between each other and towards that which they represent…”127 The representamen/signifier/word is therefore in a triadic relation to its signified/interpretant and to its object. In conjunction with the idea that the poet renews signs or invents new signs and the idea that poems are the objects of eternal interpretation, Shelley’s semiotic 123

Ibid., 512. Ibid., 512. 125 Ibid., 512. 126 See ibid., 513. The proclaimed arbitrariness seems to contradict his statements about language origin as well as the properties of poetry and their function in the world. At this point, however, the materiality of the medium is described as arbitrary. While stone imposes certain restrictions on the artist’s expression, language is a much freer and more fluid medium that can be moulded and carved more easily. Also see Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley. A Critical Reading, 2nd ed. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) 219. 127 Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 514. 124

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model also tallies with Peirce’s idea of unlimited semiosis. Shelley, employing the familiar veil metaphor, writes: “Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed.”128 Peirce asserts that every sign or symbol generates another one. Only a triadic model that resembles continuity can achieve a semiosis that is ever becoming.129 The master of the sign is also the master of the world: poets are “the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society”, they are teachers and they have a close connection to the metaphysical realm: “A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not.”130 This description of the poet has its origin in the Platonist or atomist philosophy of the Absolute, which states that each mind is only a particle of the One and the distinction between subjects is blurred.131 It also states that the poet transgresses the boundaries of time and space (one could add the subject to this enumeration); he is engaged in the process of a-limitation. The universality of a poem is made possible by an emphasis on form. While contents and their interpretation may change over time, the naturalness of rhythm and organization mirroring the structures of the One are accessible at all times.132 The divinity that Blake demanded for all men and that Novalis recognized in poets is affirmed in Shelley’s proclamation that poetry reveals the divinity of man and “creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”133 While the repetition of signs and their arbitrariness apparently leads to annihilation, poetry as motivated semiosis has creative (in the divine sense of the word) powers. Novalis, too, subscribes to this understanding of poetry. Poetry that hits the heart of the true and beautiful is poetry that could tell stories of the secrets hidden under the veil of Isis in Sais (only, of course, to veil it anew and thus allow for an unlimited series of productive interpretations). Shelley applies the metaphor of the veil once more: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar…”134 The task Shelley sets for the poet meets the very definition Novalis gives of the Romantic world view: “Die Welt muß romantisirt werden. So findet man den 128

Ibid., 528. “All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being”. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 7 and 8. Science and Philosophy. Reviews, Correspondence, and Bibliography, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966) 346. On the idea of continuity as a Romantic and pragmatist concept also see Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction, on Shelley: 10–14. 130 Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 513. 131 See Wasserman’s discussion of Defence. Wassermann argues that Shelley combines Platonist philosophy with the psychology of association. The poet gains more autonomy in Shelley’s text because divinity comes from within. Wasserman, Shelley. A Critical Reading, 205. 132 See ibid., 210. 133 Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 533. 134 Ibid., 517. 129

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urspr[ünglichen] Sinn wieder. […] Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnißvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es…”135 (The world must be romanticized. That is how one recovers its original meaning. […] I romanticize it by giving a higher meaning to the common, a mysterious importance to the everyday, the dignity of the unknown to the known, and the appearance of infinity to the finite …) To romanticize the world is both an action of the poetic imagination and a recovery of what is already present in cosmic harmony. In this sense it is both expression and imitation of a unity,136 a One (Shelley) or All (Novalis) of which the poet partakes and to which he or she has special access. Or, in Shelley’s words: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration…”137 The poet himself is involved in a process of semiosis that is both symbolic (i.e. obeys universal conventions and arbitrarily creates new signs) and iconic (diagrammatically mirroring infinite structures in the finite). To romanticize the world means to reveal its semiotic nature, to make the world a sign. Shelley’s famous conclusion is the culmination of ideal Romantic semiotics: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”138 Yet, the tension between the sign that communicates truth and the sign that bears the potential for multiple interpretations remains.

Emerson: the dissolution of the poet The dominant approach to language in the Romantic period is aesthetic. Schlegel, Novalis, Coleridge, and Shelley take recourse to questions of poetics or aesthetics when dealing with language philosophy.139 American language philosophy as represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson also displays this tendency. Like most Romantics, Emerson draws on a kind of divine language origin while empowering the individual poet at the same time. The contradiction between human reason and divine power is resolved in the idea that every man is a new Adam. Consequently, language can simultaneously become man’s invention and be Adamic. Adam himself becomes a metaphor for “human linguistic creativity”.140 Linguistic creativity is innately human as Emerson’s remarks in “Chapter IV. Language” of Nature show. He discusses language use and acquisition via the conventional examples, children and savages. Every word originates from a material appear135

Novalis, Das philosophische Werk, 334. Wasserman, Shelley. A Critical Reading, 218. 137 Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 535. 138 Ibid., 535. 139 Van Cromphout, “Emerson and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Language,” 370. 140 For further details on Emerson’s notion of Adamic language see ibid., 373. Also see John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics. The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980) 3–14. 136

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ance and is then transformed.141 This does not, however, imply a theory of imitation as proposed by thinkers of the Enlightenment.142 Emerson’s examples do not suggest a phonetic correspondence between the word ‘stone’ and the object as Cratylos in Plato’s Dialogues does. Instead, Emerson argues for metaphorical or secondary motivation. One example is the meaning of transgression as “the crossing of a line”. Emerson, no doubt, translates the Latin into its compounds. The crossing of the line, again a figure of speech, implies that someone makes a move into forbidden territory, meaning a territory outside social or religious norms. The person crossing a line is a material image while the sin that is meant by transgression is an abstract concept. Images and figures of speech are therefore the material origin of language: “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.”143 Since this kind of natural language can still be found in the conversation with the “strong-natured farmer or the back-woodsman”, country life is favoured over city life. These assumptions resonate with Wordsworth’s notorious claims from the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that the poet should avoid poetic diction and speak the language of real men, that is men close to nature.144 In this sense, Emerson is closer to Wordsworth’s idea of natural language than to Coleridge’s, who does not negate arbitrariness per se, but argues for a stylistically pleasing diction based on the association between sounds and meaning. Does Emerson propose a theory of imitative language? The natural symbol is still more of a symbol in the sense that Coleridge proposed: “On the other hand a Symbol […] is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible”.145 The symbol is not an arbitrary sign in the same way it is in Peirce’s semiotics where it denotes by law or convention. Instead, the symbol denotes by analogy. Man has the power to connect his thought with “its proper symbol” and this act is spontaneous but motivated at the same time “[b]ecause of th[e] radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts”.146 This correspondence, a Swedenborgian and a Romantic concept, is created by the harmony of all things with the mind. The individual’s thoughts are embedded and mirrored in a greater force, a “universal soul” or “Reason”, 141

See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York and London: Norton, 2001) 35. 142 See Van Cromphout, “Emerson and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Language,” 374. 143 Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 36. 144 See William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. Martin Sconfield (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2003) 12. Also see Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 372–81. 145 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 30. The quotation shows that the symbol Coleridge describes is also one of subject a-limitation and of temporal a-limitation. 146 Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 36f.

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which is also the source for inspiration. This correspondence cannot but be expressed in language as well. Words then become metaphors because nature and mind are in a metaphorical relation.147 Again, I would like to emphasize that the Romantic sign is an icon. In this light, Emerson does draw on imitation in his language theory in a similar manner to Shelley.148 Metaphor is the chief type of sign encountered in Romantic texts. At the same time, there are also diagrammatical qualities to the iconic signs because they are part of a system reflecting a greater divine concept. Divinity is expressed through nature hence “the world shall be to us an open book”,149 but at the same time a productive and creative book that allows men to create new signs “in alliance with truth and God”.150 Emerson’s sign system, which he introduces in the “Language” chapter of Nature, expresses the relational aspect of Emersonian semiotics in a condensed form: “1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.”151 I would like to propose a translation of these three statements into a triadic sign model consisting of word or symbol, object or nature, and spirit or meaning. There is a corresponding relation between all of these categories as to render this sign truly triadic but also iconic in the sense that there is a relational correspondence between object and representamen (symbol) grounded in the fact that they are both in harmony with spirit. Peirce’s triadic model leads to the continuing production of new symbols in the interpreter (spirit). Emerson, by positing the divinity of man, engages man in the same process of unlimited semiosis that, though it is in touch with the truth, does not produce signs which make truth accessible at all times. In this case it seems as if the poet, who has access to the original poetic forms of language and thereby gains a quasi-divine position in the sociolinguistic community, is also the master of the signified. The “wise men” who are able to repair corrupted language by “fasten[ing] words again to visible things” are speaking a “picturesque language [which] is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God”.152 The wise men are geniuses, philosophers, and poets:153 “The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.”154 These passages almost read like echoes 147

See Van Cromphout, “Emerson and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Language,” 375. Cf. ibid., 374. 149 Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 39. 150 Ibid., 37. 151 Ibid., 35. 152 Ibid., 37. 153 See Andrew Fiala, “Emerson and the Limits of Language,” Idealistic Studies 34.3 (2004): 289. Fiala points out that Emerson is not a Leibnizian optimist who thinks that by bettering language humankind can be perfected. This shows how Enlightenment questions are still being debated in Romanticism. The understanding of language is replaced by a more flexible approach, though. 154 Emerson, Emerson’ s Prose and Poetry, 47. 148

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of Shelley’s Defence, but Emerson exceeds Shelley’s passionate rhetoric. This relation endows the poet with creative powers: “He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.”155 He can “conform things to his thoughts” because he sees nature as “fluid”.156 Emerson describes the divine poet/man Blake demanded to enable true creation. Nature ends with the notorious appeal: “Build, therefore, your own world.”157 With the help of symbols, the poet can create a world by reshaping fluid nature. Emerson thus adds to the power of the sign and at the same time stresses the fluidity of things. Both concepts are also present in Novalis’s work. The poet is described as someone who by becoming fluid might also rise to be a true sorcerer. In his later essay, The Poet, Emerson continues the discussion along similar lines: nature is described as a symbol and the connection between the soul and the universe is emphasized. Like Shelley, Emerson sees the potential of symbols for the renewal through poetic language and repeats the idea that the poet is creating the world by reattributing true meaning. The concept of making something new by recreating it is further elaborated in the notion of “pre-cantations”. All things undergo a metamorphosis that aims at a transformation into melody. The idea of pre-cantations is not only Platonic, but also resonates with Eichendorff’s poem: the song (pre-cantation) slumbering in things is awoken by the poet who re-attaches the right symbol to the thing. Emerson employs the same metaphor Novalis uses: “We seem to be touched by a wand”158 when the poet uses symbols correctly. Only this time, the poet seems to be able to do more than fool around with his wand. Emerson draws on another familiar metaphor in this context. In Poetry and Imagination he writes: “A poet comes who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the laws of the universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; – and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities”.159 The poet reads nature and (re-)creates the world in Emerson’s essays. Thus, Emerson surpasses Shelley’s notion of poets as the unacknowledged legislators by proclaiming: “Poets are thus liberating gods”.160 Emerson seems to invoke the climactic apotheosis of the poet whose imagination is in flux and who can, in a state of becoming, find the magic word to unlock the world for men. Yet, Emerson encounters two problems. The first one is that he looks “in vain for the poet whom [he] describe[s]”.161 He calls on poets to persist in becoming this ideal poet, to exceed all limits, to look for “twilight”, “transparent boundaries”, “outlets”, 155

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 45. 157 Ibid., 55. 158 Ibid., 193. 159 Ibid., 307. 160 Ibid., 193. 161 Ibid., 195. 156

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“danger”, “awe”, “love” and take on his task. Emerson employs strong metaphors of alimitation in his appeal to the poet. Spaces are crossed, time is rendered indefinite, the sublime and dangerous push men to the limits of transgression. The ideal of a-limitation, however, also constitutes the second problem: the limitlessness of language that limits the poet’s capacity to see and transmit truth with it. In Nature, Emerson already hints at this problem: “Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.”162 Here Emerson is complaining about the limits of language that keep men from the truth even while language is the only instrument they have to seek that truth. This is a dilemma that can clearly be traced back to the language philosophy of the Enlightenment which attempted to find a solution by inventing logical languages. In The Poet, the problem has shifted from the question of representation to that of unlimited semiosis.163 The poet may not “rest in meaning” “[f]or all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”164 The simile is again one of becoming and of movement. Language means travelling through semiotic space and not standing in a fixed place in a semiotic net or system. Since Emerson claims that “[we] are symbols, and inhabit symbols”,165 men accordingly live highly unstable lives as the fluidity and the metamorphosis beheld and conveyed by the poet are a human characteristic as well. The self, through its symbolic nature, becomes unfixed and enters a state of becoming as well.166 Reading Emerson as an advocator of dissolving subjects in flux seems unusual at first glance – after all, Emerson is famous for his call for selfreliance and his claim that humans should look for all answers in the self, not in society, books, other countries, or any kind of doctrine.167 The strong self is one that does not conform, not even to coherence or consistency: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds […] To be great is to be misunderstood.”168 These statements can be read to signify either the independence of the self from everyone, or the dependence of the self on the language of a-limitation that, being

162

Ibid., 42. Fiala correctly identifies this shift but claims that Emerson became increasingly aware of the limits of language. I would like to argue, instead, that he became aware of the limitlessness of language. 164 Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 195. 165 Ibid., 189. 166 Fiala arrives at a similar conclusion from a different direction. The inability to express oneself in a limited language leads to the questioning of perfect individuality. Fiala also contends that Emerson was therefore not a part of what Charles Taylor has identified as ‘subjective expressionism’. This study argues that the self in Romanticism is generally something that oscillates between formation/affirmation and decomposition/dissolution. Emerson would therefore not constitute an exceptional case, but rather a prototypical Romantic example of subject a-limitation. 167 See Emerson’s programmatic essay Self-Reliance in Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. 168 Ibid., 125. 163

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in a state of flux and becoming, leaves no choice but to generate misunderstandings.169 The self, dependent on language, therefore has to be inconsistent and celebrate this inconsistency. The self is as transparent as the eye-ball it should become. The poet is the best example of this inconsistency or even incoherence: “His own body is a fleeing apparition, – his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet.”170 Emerson describes a process that takes the self, usually contained by bodily boundaries, apart by categories of time and space (being present in a particular moment). The poet is a transgressor of time and space, but he “observes higher laws than he transgresses”.171 These laws are the laws of becoming, of fluidity, of language games, of knowing the truth and multiple truths at the same time, the “endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis”172 – or the laws of a-limitation.

Romantic tensions today: between signification and subjectification Eichendorff’s magic word opposed to complicated Gothic tales, different opinions on why the veil of Isis cannot be lifted (Novalis), tensions between Adamic and human origins of language (Schlegel, Coleridge), ambivalent feelings about the conventional nature of language (Blake), the contrast of the veil that is lifted to reveal the truth and the endless succession of new veils (Shelley), the contrast between the poet as liberating God or as fluxional symbol (Emerson) – all these contradictions illustrate the major tension in Romanticism between a unified sign that communicates the truth and wild language games that keep men from ever arriving at truth. There are different accentuations and different tendencies. While Coleridge does not necessarily see a contradiction between poetic diction and arbitrariness, Wordsworth and Emerson are looking for poetry in the language of men. While English and American thinkers seem to include a more pragmatic perspective that does not deny the existence of the ‘thing’, Novalis, at times, engages in wild speculations about language systems. While Coleridge, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, discusses the political danger of arbitrary language, other authors restrict their comments to the aesthetic. The general tension, however, can be felt in all of the discussed texts.

169

On this argument also see Fiala, “Emerson and the Limits of Language,” 290. Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 301. 171 Ibid., 301. 172 Ibid., 299.

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The tension between divine truth and fluid language games is the reason for the phenomena of semiotic a-limitation in Romantic texts alongside the celebration of magic words. A similar tension can be diagnosed for the other two dimensions of alimitation discussed in the present study: the strong, self-reliant individual contradicts the ideas of transcendence and dissolution; concepts of landscape and nation contradict the perception of open space and movement. Two chapters (an interpretative and a theoretical plateau) are devoted to each of these dimensions of a-limitation. The semiotic tension looks for relief in an all-powerful poet (who remains merely a limit that no poet can achieve) and in concepts such as the symbol (in Coleridge’s sense of the word) or the metaphor, because they incorporate naturalness as iconic or indexical properties of the sign without denying the potential for unlimited semiosis. How can the iconic and the indexical traits of language be incorporated into the arbitrary sign? Romantic terminology and thought is in no way unified – the same issues arise in German, English, and American Romanticism, but with different focal points and slightly different results. This multiplicity of ideas should not be disregarded or glossed over, but a noticeable tendency towards a semiotic conception of the diagrammatic sign is implied by the notions of analogy, correspondence, relation, and homogeneity that pervade many of the texts.173 The diagrammatic sign, one of the three iconic signs in Peirce’s typology, is divided as follows: “Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors.”174 Images are the most unmediated iconic signs because they represent colors and shapes. Metaphors are the most mediated signs because they rely on the similarity of two symbolic signs. Diagrams are in between. Neither objects nor their qualities are represented, but rather their relations. There is, therefore, an iconic correspondence between things and signs that is, however, based neither on mimesis nor on pure imitation. Diagrams are iconic signs of relations and therefore depend on both indices and symbols: “A diagram is a representamen which is predominantly an icon of relations and is aided to be so by conventions. Indices are also more or less used.”175 The best example is a map or a chart. Oceans, rivers, mountains are depicted by their analogous shape to the real landscape and their 173

I will not discuss metaphor in this context because its role in Romantic poetics is widely acknowledged. 174 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 2. Elements of Logic, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 157. (CP 2.277) 175 See Nöth, Handbuch, 196. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 4. The simplest Mathematics, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 341. (CP 4.418)

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relation to each other. The river on the map points to the real river (index), but at the same time constitutes a symbol because the viewer has to understand that this blue line refers to the real river. Obvious as this may seem, the real river is in fact not very similar to the river on the map or chart. It differs in material (water-paper), color (conventional map blue-mixture of white, green, brown), size, analogous size (if real rivers had the same proportional size to mountains and streets as on maps, our world would look very different), sound, smell, and so on. As only relations are depicted, a conventional system is required to understand the iconic and indexical diagram. A diagram is therefore a mixture of all signs with a special emphasis on iconicity, and it is a way of thinking in relations. It allows us to think of screams as indices of emotions, and of early language as an analogous system to those screams. It allows us to understand poetry as something that does not mirror reality but rather corresponds to it in relational aspects. It allows us to think of our thoughts neo-platonically as corresponding to the ideal without being a copy. The diagram preserves difference while not negating harmony or correspondence. The sign can be arbitrary (arbitrary blue for a river) but natural (resembling the relations of the world and pointing to the world) at the same time. Since the diagrammatic sign can negotiate between the two opposites of arbitrariness and naturalness around which Romantic semiotic discourse develops, it is a recurring concept in the texts discussed above. The topographical turn and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s geophilosophy indicate that the diagrammatic sign has not lost its appeal in recent theory. In fact, though their approach to liminal phenomena is chiefly through spatial metaphorics, the chapters on semiotics in A Thousand Plateaus discuss the same problems featured in the sections above on the semiotics of Romanticism. Language origin, for example, comprises the key problem in Romantic discourse. Deleuze and Guattari begin their chapter “Postulates of Linguistics” in that tradition with the child in school and the question of first language. Language is a concept of power made “to be obeyed, and compel obedience”.176 If language does not exist to transmit information or to communicate but to give orders, its origin cannot lie in the conventional sources: “The ‘first’ language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse. [emphasis Deleuze and Guattari].”177 Their example is taken from Benveniste: a bee does not have a language, it can communicate the source of food it has seen to other bees, but it cannot communicate the message without having seen the food. Language is the transmission from a second to a third party, it is ordered and it orders. The subject communicating is not important either because indirect discourse and free indirect discourse shift individuality. Bearing in mind these rather negative presuppositions that link language to hierar-

176 177

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 84. Ibid., 85.

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chy and law, the dismantling of language that follows is not surprising. A Thousand Plateaus tries to find ways to escape power, hierarchy, the State, and any kind of order. In most semiotic theories, the sign is also an ordered complex. It can be a dyadic sign, a sign comprised of several dyads, or a triadic sign. Usually, the following compounds appear in some shape or form: signifier, signified, and, in triadic models, referent. Deleuze and Guattari operate with a dyad of corporeal modifications (or content) and incorporeal transformations (or expression). The planes are independent and heterogeneous. There is no correspondence between them because the action (a knife cutting flesh) is something different from the statement (“the knife is cutting flesh”).178 The magical correspondence between sign and world is refuted in favour of “reciprocal presupposition, and […] continual passage from one to the other”.179 Content is also not a signified nor expression a signifier, “rather, both are variables of the assemblage”.180 While there is no harmony between the two sides, there is a relation of influence or a functioning together of the machinic assemblage (bodies, action, passions) and the collective assemblage of enunciation (acts, statements, incorporeal transformations).181 Kafka supplies an example: there is the court-machine with its bodies on the content side and “the regime of signs of enunciation” on the expression side with its acts, death sentences, and the law.182 This thought process is a recurring argumentation strategy with Deleuze and Guattari. They posit a dualism (content-expression), make alterations to a familiar concept (the two sides are not signified and signifier), reintroduce a reciprocal relation into the dualism with the help of their neologisms (assemblage), and finally give an example from literature or science (Kafka). The content (court) is similar to the signified or communicating agent of the expression (law), but not exactly the same. This procedure renders Deleuze and Guattari’s sign model extremely difficult to understand. In the section on the semiotics of Romanticism, statements on the origin of language served to explain sign models. The same procedure can be applied to A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari develop their own history of language calling it “the regimes of signs” in the chapter of the same title.183 There are four regimes of signs: signifying regime, presignifying regime, countersignifying regime, and postsignifying regime. The description of the signifying regime sounds familiar as it seems to lament the unlimited semiosis of the arbitrary sign: There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign (the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign’s rela178

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 96. 180 Ibid., 101. 181 Ibid., 97f. 182 Ibid., 98. 183 See “587 B.C–A.D. 70: On several regimes of signs” ibid., 123–64. 179

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Magic Words? The Semiotics of Romanticism tion to a state of things it designates, or to an entity it signifies, but only the formal relation of sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The limitlessness of signifiance replaces the sign.184

The circles and chains of language only relating to itself are a motif that Romantic writers such as Novalis, Shelley, and Emerson employ. Because of this problem, interpretation becomes necessary and poets and prophets are called for. Deleuze and Guattari have a grimmer outlook on unlimited semiosis. They call the interpreter who creates a signified “priest”, “seer”, and “one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats”.185 The unacknowledged legislator and the liberating gods of Romanticism have become evil tyrants who impose meaning on the reader. Their image is that of the face as content or the body that needs to be overcome and dismantled. If the signifying regime is so horrible, do Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it should be abolished in favour of an earlier stage? The presignifying regime seems to offer such a promise: “First, the so-called primitive presignifying semiotic, which is much closer to ‘natural’ codings operating without signs. There is no reduction to faciality as the sole substance of expression: there is no elimination of forms of content through abstraction of the signified.”186 Instead there is pluralism and polyvocality that prevents any seizure of power and that “preserves expressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality, gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form”.187 Indeed, several key concepts reminiscent of Romantic presignifying semiotics (or those of language origin) are evoked: primitive origin, natural language, no abstraction, expressivism, gesture, rhythm, dance, and rite. The proximity of the presignifying sign to the body and its emotions and the apparent nostalgia for those primitive, better times might be taken straight from Romanticism. Are Deleuze and Guattari searching for the original language like the apprentices in Sais? In the chapter on faciality, they provide an answer: “It is not a question of ‘returning’ to the presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples. […] We can’t turn back.”188 For the Romantics, a fragile solution lies in the poet who can understand the language of nature, who can read traces of original language in arbitrary language, or who can renew a fallen language. Regression, however, is not an option either. For Deleuze and Guattari the solution lies in a different kind of sign. Before turning to this sign, I will briefly delineate the other two regimes. The countersignifying regime receives only little attention from Deleuze and Guattari despite its nomadic, war-like nature. It is determined by arithmetic and numeration, by functions and relations that allow for multiple combinations. It would not be far-fetched 184

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 126. 186 Ibid., 130. 187 Ibid., 130. 188 Ibid., 208f. 185

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to point to Novalis’s repeated claim of the affinity of language to mathematics as a way of explaining how language withdraws from human understanding. While mathematics is certainly on the side of language games and abstraction in Novalis, the countersignifying regime in Deleuze and Guattari does contain an element of secrecy and the idea of the cipher (in context with spying and decoding); it implies, on the other side, ideas of destruction. The concepts of function and relation (which are also familiar from Novalis’s Fichte Studies) points to the diagrammatic once more. The last regime, the postsignifying regime, is discussed in greater detail because signification (from the signifying regime) and subjectification (from the postsignifying regime) are the two major concepts Deleuze and Guattari work with in several chapters of A Thousand Plateaus. All regimes are mixed, but certain regimes dominate in certain periods and can be traced on a semiotic map. The comparison between the signifying (paranoid or despotic) regime and the postsignifying (passional, subjective, authoritarian) regime serves as a means to locate regimes on the semiotic map. Different images are assigned to the two regimes: the circle (unlimited semiosis) to the signifying regime, and the line to the postsignifying regime. Analogously, the human face is part of the signifying regime, while God’s face is averted in the postsignifying regime which attributes a major role to the prophet.189 The prophet as mediator between absent God (absolute signified) and humans bears Romantic traits. While the Romantic prophet is a positive figure, he has retained little of his power in Deleuze and Guattari’s model: “The prophet does not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a new form of semiophagy. Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing: his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative, his relation to God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying”.190 Either the prophet’s words or the book take the place of God, who is absent. The book is the face of the postsignifying regime. Interpretation becomes bound to the book. This means that there is no longer a sign-sign relation as there is in the signifying regime, but that there is also something outside of signs. The regime is associated with subjectification because it subjects the sign to an authority, but also because the subject plays a role in it. In the postsignifying regime of subjectification “the sign is swept via subjects”.191 The signified-signifier relation is transformed into a subject of statement and subject of enunciation relation. Deleuze and Guattari adopt this distinction which is used in (post)structuralist semiotics to distinguish between the proposition, or what is said, and the way language constitutes the subject, or how something is said. Their examples are from religious and psychoanalytic discourses. As God withdraws and presents the tablets to Moses, who is constituted as the subject of enunciation, the former becomes a point of subjectification. The Jewish people then become the subject of statement. 189

See ibid., 134ff. Ibid., 137. 191 Ibid., 141. 190

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Descartes’s ‘Cogito/I think’ is the subject of enunciation as the subject constitutes itself through saying ‘I think’. This subject of enunciation, who is at the same time doubting himself (deterritorializing), is reassured by the subject of statement, the union of soul and body and the ‘I think’. This could be interpreted in the following way: There are in fact two subjects: the linguistic shifter and the body subject. Benveniste is the patron of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument about the two subjects that form and guarantee each other and are represented on the content level by lovers who passionately love but also betray each other. The transcendent dimension can be abolished if man can posit himself through language. In the history of subjectivity, this regime plays an important part. There is a line from the Cogito to the self-positing ‘I’ in Idealism to the subject of enunciation. In Romanticism, subject philosophy has reached the stage where the subject can posit itself and becomes an individual in relation to others. As the chapters on subject a-limitation show, this stage makes the subject vulnerable to dissolution. Subject dissolution is also part of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of subjectification. If we are in control of ourselves through language powers, and if we are using signs that are empty and non-referential (Benveniste), anybody can use a sign to turn themselves into a subject. Since there is no subject before the subject of enunciation and this subject uses non-referential language, there is no subject at all, “only collective assemblages of enunciation”.192 Both regimes effect a movement of deterritorialization (meaning the dissolution of order and relations so that new connections can be formed). One is described as negative and the other as positive (though they are both negative, as Deleuze and Guattari say later on). The unlimited semiosis of the signifying regime is negative because it just throws the subject from one sign to the next. The deterritorialization of subjectification races down a positive line of flight attaining “absolute deterritorialization expressed in the black hole of consciousness and passion”.193 The problem is that this kind of deterritorialization is dangerous. The death wish inherent in every subject leads to dissolution and self-annihilation. The Romantic tension between the arbitrary sign (signifying regime) and the natural sign (presignifying regime) has shifted in Deleuze and Guattari to a tension between getting lost in language (signifying regime) and the positing of the self that is always in danger of annihilation (postsignifying regime). Traces of the postsignifying regime can be detected in Novalis, who, pondering the self-positing ‘I’ in Fichte, reformulates Fichte’s theory as a theory of dissolution: “Ich bin nicht inwiefern ich mich setze, sondern inwiefern ich mich aufhebe”194 (I am not to the extent that I posit myself, but to the extent that I cancel myself). As every regime is a mixed semiotic, it can be assumed that further traces of the postsignifying regime can be detected in Romanticism. 192

Ibid., 144. Ibid., 147. 194 Novalis, Das philosophische Werk, 104. 193

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Provisionally concluding on the discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s history of language, I would like to suggest that similar problematics to those evident in Romanticism mark their semiotics: how can one create a sign that is neither despotic nor an endless chain of signifiers? I have identified the diagrammatic sign defined as an icon of relations and an index of referents represented by a partially arbitrary sign as one possible solution for the Romantic tension. Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to their problematic regimes is diagrammatic as well. In A Thousand Plateaus they treat the diagram and the diagrammatic with enthusiasm: “Destratify, open up to a new function, a diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and passion the double of one person for another. […] Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification […] Use the I think for a becoming-animal, and love for a becoming-woman of man”.195 The diagrammatic is the possibility “of a positive absolute deterritorialization on the plane of consistency or the body without organs”.196 What is this diagrammatic apart from being connected to other concepts such as the body without organs and becoming? The diagrammatic is not what Peirce defines as diagrammatic iconicity.197 In a footnote Deleuze and Guattari proclaim their indebtedness to Peirce and their adoption of the term for their own purposes: “Peirce is the true inventor of semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First, indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by territoriality-deterritorialization relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol.”198 Their desire to re-define the Peircian diagrammatic sign is only partially successful. Peirce’s diagrammatic sign is not reducible to either icon or symbol. Instead, it is a mixture of all three kinds of signs. In fact, this may be the point Deleuze and Guattari are trying to make when they attempt to define the diagrammatic in a very ‘signifying-regime-way’ by referring to even more of their neologisms. The diagrammatic is a transsemiotic that shifts from regime to regime transforming the regimes and creating new ones. It is an abstract ma-

195

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 148. Ibid., 149. 197 Bauer and Ernst call Deleuze a “Grenzgänger der Diagrammatik”. See Bauer and Ernst, Diagrammatik, 311–15. 198 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 586. There are several additional points that should be mentioned. These signs are not based on the signifier-signified relation but on the relation between signifier and object. Deleuze and Guattari call indexes ‘territorial signs’, icons ‘reterritorializing signs’, and symbols signs that pertain to negative deterritorialization (157). This typology is relatively consistent with their earlier description of the signifying system and could be translated back into Peirce’s categories: symbol (unlimited semiosis), index (causal relation), and icon (similarity reinstated). By using cartography as a conceptual metaphor, Deleuze and Guattari retain some classical features of the diagram. The map is not an image of reality, but a positive virtual space that allows for tracing and lines of flight.

196

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chine that has no form and makes no distinction between expression and content.199 It does not make a distinction between artificial or natural; it operates by matter and function.200 This sounds much more radical than the Romantic diagrammatic that is defined by correspondences or harmony. Deleuze and Guattari do not want harmony, yet, their diagrammatic points in a similar direction. In the diagrammatic mode “[w]riting now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes.”201 “The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”202 This real is different from fiction which is produced by expression only. There is also content in it: “It is an Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent.”203 These quotations resonate with the idea of Romantic creation through a kind of writing that understands the secrets of language and reality as God’s creations. It suggests a sign that transgresses all other signs because “form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content” – they meld into particle-signs.204 Is the diagrammatic perhaps the mechanism behind divinity or divinity itself? Yet, Deleuze and Guattari clearly state that it is not an Absolute in the sense of transcendence (Romanticism) or undifferentiated unity (the One in Platonism). Postmodernist theory has created a new Absolute, but it is still an Absolute. The difference is that it does not pre-exist, but is in the process of being created, or in the process of what Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming”. Deleuze and Guattari share the creative and dynamic notion of diagrammatics (or “becoming”) with the Romantics.205 Diagrammatic reasoning is always half perceiving and half creating since the manipulation of diagrams creates new possibilities of thought and new realities. Their notion of the map, or the rhizome, corresponds to the idea of the diagrammatic, which they also perform in their own book (by using diagrams but also by arranging chapters in a diagrammatic way).206 Undoubtedly, there is something confusing and contradictory about A Thousand Plateaus, but the contemporaries of Emerson felt the same way about his writing which is perhaps one reason for his claim quoted earlier: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds […] To be great is to be misunderstood.” Concepts like the diagrammatic have an air of magic about them. Romantic correspondence is replaced by reciprocal influence. There is no song sleeping in things, but songs and things and sub199

See ibid., 156. See ibid., 156. 201 Ibid., 156. 202 Ibid., 157. 203 Ibid., 157. 204 Ibid., 157. 205 On becoming in the diagrammatics of Deleuze see Bauer and Ernst, Diagrammatik, 313. 206 See ibid., 313. 200

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jects are merging and taking part in each other. Thus, creation as becoming could also be called magic. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the writer as a sorcerer later on. The person who creates, the sorcerer, is using magic words that are no longer just ordinary signs. Instead, the sorcerer operates through particles and merges with his creations.207 The Romantic poet, endowed with magical capabilities in Eichendorff, dissolving in Novalis, creating the world anew in Shelley, and already translucent in Emerson, has turned into a Postmodernist sorcerer in the state of becoming. The semiotics of Romanticism is magical in two senses: First, because natural signs retain a connection between the components of the sign and a transcendent dimension. Second, because arbitrary signs are engaged in secret language games that can only be understood by the poet who is swept away by them. In most texts, the first magical sign has a positive connotation and is depicted as a lost ideal. Arbitrariness, while viewed negatively in many Romantic texts, also bears potential. Both semiotic concepts bring language to its limit, which human reason can only pass in theory. The boundaries between signifier and signified are transgressed in the first case. In the second, endless chains of signs pull the reader down a semiotic maelstrom. Finally, the diagrammatic sign, as a way of mediating between the two concepts, merges different sign categories that seem separate. It is a solution adapted in many cases that does not, however, eliminate the two semiotics of a-limitation. Deleuze and Guattari treat analogous problems and evaluate the two Romantic types of semiotic a-limitation similarly. The natural sign of the presignifying regime is considered a better but a lost state that cannot be regained. However, since every semiotic regime is eventually a mixture between different regimes, there are still presignifying traces in signifying regimes. The signifying regime is clearly one of harmful, negative, and dangerous deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari propose a Postmodernist solution that does away with everything constituting a sign by creating a force called the diagrammatic that transforms the formerly moderate (Romantic) solution into a semiotics of a-limitation, as well.

207

See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 265.

3. Semiotic Boundaries

Expressions of semiotic a-limitation One of the reasons for the constant transcendence, crossing, transgression, dissolution, and elimination of boundaries – in short, for a-limitation – in Romanticism is the tension between the two contrasting semiotics described in the previous chapter. On the one hand, an almost medieval belief in the Adamic sign, a sign whose transcendent signified is conferred by God and whose signifiers lead us to God’s truth, prompts various attempts to recreate an original, motivated, and natural language through true poetry. On the other hand, first traces of the Modernist language crisis and Postmodernist solutions lead to sign models based on arbitrariness, difference, and selfreflexivity. As a result, a tension exists between the two notions that cannot be easily resolved, not even by attempts to perceive signs diagrammatically, defined by both motivated and arbitrary characteristics, or by elevating the poet and his human language to a transcendent status. Therefore, the Romantic sign remains located in a boundary zone between absolute meaning (the unity of signified and signifier) and the constant deferral of meaning. This tension functions like an electrical current, a blue flash buzzing between two poles. Romantic texts exist in this exciting space that energizes them, but also harbors dangers. This liminal nature of the Romantic text is expressed on different levels. The following chapter will deal with the literary thematization of liminal semiotics and its realization on the textual and narrative levels in a late Romantic novel, Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick or The Whale by comparing its processes and mechanisms to other (German and English) texts. The main assumption behind this semiotic interpretation of Moby-Dick is that the semiotics in the text functions according to the same tension between absolute sign and indecipherable sign as the semiotics of the text. In other words, the text reflects on its own semiotics on the story and discourse levels. The occurrence of semiotic boundary phenomena such as the ones analyzed in this chapter is always accompanied by spatial and subject a-limitation. Starting with the discussion of signs in Moby-Dick, this chapter will point to the relation between the three dimensions, but focus on the semiotic a-limitation in the text. Different texts have different ways of expressing or realizing semiotic a-limitation. Moby-Dick functions as

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a prototypical text in this chapter because all the discussed forms of semiotic a-limitation occur in that novel. The other texts under discussion show that semiotic a-limitation is not specific to late American Romanticism, but that it is a universal phenomenon realized in different literary ways. After the signs in Moby-Dick, I will proceed to analyze boundary crossings between different texts and media (ekphrasis and intertextuality) in Melville’s novel, Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.1 Within Mob-Dick, several boundary crossings take place that culminate in what I call Ishmael’s schizonarration: the appearance and disappearance of the narrator within his story, which is triggered by other a-limitation phenomena. As the comparison with the other texts shows, narrative transgressions, such as embedded tales and a confusion of different possible worlds in the text, are not limited to Moby-Dick. Melmoth and E.T.A Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf exhibit similar boundary crossings. Finally, I will return to the idea of the synchrony between the semiotics in and of the text by interpreting Ishmael’s semiotics as a poetics torn between writing a root- or rhizomebook.

Moby-Dick: signs on men and whales Queequeg In Moby-Dick, signs are not just those that one might expect to find when reading an adventure story set on a whaling ship. Of course, the whale hunt depends on reading naval charts correctly and on spotting the whale by its blowing spout (hence the famous call “There she blows!”2), which constitute typical indexical signs. Signs, however, are also part of the subject. They can be found on human and animal bodies as well as on various objects. Their inseparable link to the material, to their medium or carrier, however, does not render interpretation any easier, only more desirable. Body-signs such as tattoos, scars, or skin patterns form the closest possible link between sign and subject because the sign’s medium is the boundary of the subject itself (skin as the boundary between subject and external world). Thus, body-signs trigger particularly strong desires for interpretation and meaning-making. In Moby-Dick, one of the most interesting protagonists, Queequeg, is covered with a huge tattoo to whose exact meaning he and the narrator remain oblivious. The incomprehension of this special kind of body language is more frustrating for the narrator than for the bearer of the ciphers himself.

1 2

For the theoretical background of the concepts analyzed in this chapter see chapter 4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, eds. Harrison Hayford, et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001) 215.

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The reader accompanies the autodiegetic narrator Ishmael on his first encounter with Queequeg and his signifying body. In fact, Ishmael provides a detailed account of his first attempt to decipher Queequeg.3 After having reluctantly agreed to share a bed with an unknown harpooner, Ishmael is very impatient to see his bedfellow once he enters the room late at night: “I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time…”.4 The averted face creates insecurity because the face is a significant source of information. The face ultimately reveals something about the subject. It is the sign of the subject and the subject itself in one. That is why Postmodernist philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari make an effort to dismantle the face, to make it “asignifying” and “asubjective”.5 Ishmael, however, needs to see the face. When Queequeg finally turns around, he is terrified by the “dark, purplish, yellow color” and the “large blackish looking squares”.6 He tries to subdue his terror by an immediate act of interpretation, speculating that the strange harpooner must have been in a fight. As Queequeg turns his face to the light, this hypothesis has to be rejected in favor of another one: “At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man – a whaleman too – who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.”7 Ishmael relies on past experience to complete fragmentary information and make sense of what he sees. However, this is just an “inkling of the truth” – literally a hint written in ink – the entire truth will remain hidden to him. When Queequeg undresses and reveals that his entire body is covered with signs, Ishmael infers that “he must be some abominable savage”.8 Ishmael is so afraid of the “cannibal” that he cannot even ask him about his strange body: “I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.”9 The inexplicable, or explaining the inexplicable, are linked to danger from the very beginning of the novel. The inexplicable savage is interpreted as abominable and anthropophagous. Soon Ishmael will revise this conclusion as well and become friends with the tattooed harpooner. Yet, the inexplicable will remain Queequeg’s character trait. In the first chapter of the novel, Ishmael already informs his reader that the inexplicable is what fascinates him most. His friendship with the inexplicable Queequeg is therefore only logical. Queequeg remains inexplicable chiefly because Ishmael never deciphers his tattoos, but also because his culture remains mysterious to Ishmael. Over the course of the 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I am grateful to Zuzanna Jakubowski for first pointing this out to me. Melville, Moby-Dick, 21. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 185–211. Melville, Moby-Dick, 21. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22.

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novel, their friendship recedes into the background, but the fascination with Queequeg’s tattoos and the desire to understand them persist. This desire also instigates processes of subject a-limitation, or the desire to merge with other subjects or objects. The morning after the strange bedfellows agree to spend the night in one bed, Ishmael wakes up in the arms of Queequeg. Their merging is described with an interesting spatial metaphor: The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade […] this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together…10

The labyrinth as spatial representation of the mysterious is complemented by the patchwork quilt, which is one of the models Deleuze and Guattari use to explain smooth space.11 Its irregularity and openness renders it suitable for a metaphor of infinity, boundlessness, and multiplicity. The labyrinth is a space which cannot be easily navigated. It is restricted by boundaries, yet, once entered, it seems infinite. It has a center, but this center is nearly impossible to find and often dangerous (a Minotaur might be waiting there). It has an entrance or exit, which is equally difficult to find. The architecture of the labyrinth is that of striated and organized space, but the perception of the labyrinth is that of smooth space. Queequeg’s body is the link between the two spatial semiotics of the labyrinth and the patchwork space. The bounded labyrinth expands into the (potentially) infinite quilt. The hand of the subject merges through its semiotic quality with the space of the quilt. Subject, sign, and space become one. This merging of subject, sign, and space triggers a memory that makes clear that it is also an uncanny merging of two subjects. Having slept all day, the child Ishmael wakes up in the night: Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside.12

Again, fear arises from limited perception. Darkness, silence, the nameless, and the unimaginable are terrifying because almost all of the senses are obliterated: vision, hearing, interpretation, and imagination are blocked. The tactile sense alone is insufficient to explain the inexplicable as the repetition of “seem” in the quotation above illustrates. Whether or not this experience really happened, or whether it was just part of a dream, its disturbing effect stays with Ishmael. Years later, when he wakes up embraced by Queequeg, he does not feel the same fear. Yet, the sensation of a supernatural hand that touches his own body is the same. In this sense, Queequeg is not only “a 10 11 12

Ibid., 25. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 524–28. Melville, Moby-Dick, 26.

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creature in the transition state”13 between barbarity and civilization (as Ishmael sees him), but also in a transitional state between reality and imagination, between signification and indecipherability. Since Ishmael knows who is hugging him, he is not as afraid as when the unknowable hand touches him. Yet, since Ishmael does not really know who Queequeg is and what his tattoos mean, he still feels as if he were being touched by something supernatural. Queequeg does not know the meaning of his tattoos either.14 Nevertheless, they are significant to him. Having fallen ill, Queequeg prepares to die. As part of his preparations he asks for a coffin in which he wishes to float to the stars via the “uncontinented seas” that “interflow with the blue heavens”.15 There “seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing”.16 On the verge of death, Queequeg becomes a sign. His subjectivity almost vanishes in favour of the indecipherable message on his skin, which, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold…17

Ishmael’s choice of hieroglyphics to describe the enigmatic writing on Queequeg shows that Melville is knowledgeable of contemporary semiotic discourses revolving around the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics (which comprises part of the quest for original language). Queequeg’s body-signs are not just decorative; they point to ancient wisdom, to the art of attaining the truth that can only be known by divinities or those inspired by the divine. Of course, the well-known reading of Moby-Dick as an epistemological quest makes Ishmael one of the questors seeking the truth. Again, it seems only logical for Ishmael to merge with someone who is marked with a labyrinth at whose center the truth lies. Queequeg himself, though he does not understand his bodysigns, understands their importance. After his recovery, he uses his coffin to copy the tattoos of his body onto the wood. The transference of the highly significant and enigmatic signs, which harbor a transcendental signified, onto the coffin is a mere reproduction of their signifiers. Meaning is transferred to a different material but it is not understood. Queequeg uses a similar procedure when he is asked to sign the contract papers for his employment on the Pequod. Since he is illiterate, he is asked to make his mark. He “copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm”.18 The name as sign of the self is literally part of the self in Queequeg’s case. He copies down his enigmatic subjectivity, reproducing a mystery in 13 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid., 27. See ibid., 481. Ibid., 478. Ibid., 477. Ibid., 480. Ibid., 89.

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a profane action. The cross printed in both the American and English editions does not resemble a “queer round figure” at all. The original was probably changed by the typesetter so that the reader of Moby-Dick is now even further removed from Queequeg’s signified.19 The signifier we can see is not only a copy but an altered copy of the truth. This deferral of meaning is accompanied by an insulting misnaming of Queequeg as Quohog by the ship’s proprietors. The wrong mark bears a wrong name. Queequeg’s body-marks show that the tension between the transcendent signified and indecipherability or self-reflexivity persists as a topic in late American Romanticism. On Queequeg’s body, the truth is laid out in a kind of ancient (perhaps original) language by a prophet, i.e. someone with access to the transcendent signified. Yet, the truth is not even understood by its bearer; the subject is a mere medium that keeps reproducing its signifiers. Queequeg identifies himself with the signs, makes them his mark, and becomes a sign himself without any desire for interpretation. Queequeg serves to illustrate three areas that I would like to pursue in the following sections: the connection between sign and subject, the connection between name and subject, and the desire for interpretation.

Ahab and Ishmael Queequeg is not the only person who is marked, or who marks his body. Ahab, the whale, and Ishmael have body-signs as well. Ahab is even marked twice: by his artificial leg and by a strange scar. Ahab’s ivory leg, which replaces the one he lost in the preceding fight with Moby Dick, is an uncanny index pointing to the nearly lethal encounter in the past and to the lethal encounter in the future. The whale left a sign of destruction, a warning, but also a part of himself. The metonymic relation between the leg as part and the whale as whole on top of the causal relation comprise a strong indexical sign as basis for Ahab’s becoming-whale.20 Ahab also uses the leg to gain his bearings after observing the sun: 19 20

See Note in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, eds. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, 2 ed. (New York and London: Norton 2002) 85. Tamsin Lorraine reads Ahab’s becoming-whale from a spatial perspective. See Tamsin Lorraine, “Ahab and Becoming-Whale: The Nomadic Subject in Smooth Space,” Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Greg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) 169f. Ahab is a nomadic subject that follows a line of flight in deterritorialized space and time. Lorraine also stresses the enticing and risky nature of Ahab’s becoming-whale by sharing a “space-time block” (170) with Moby Dick. In this chapter my approach to Ahab’s a-limitation is from a semiotic perspective, but it should be kept in mind that space and sign interact and intermingle. Hugh T. Crawford comes to a slightly different conclusion. He reads Deleuze with Melville (instead of the other way around). Ahab’s leg is an indicator for being part-whale, but the tracing and the chart also point to striation. Therefore there are nomadic and arborescent elements in Ahab. See Hugh T. Crawford, “Captain Deleuze and the White Whale,” Social Semiotics 7.2 (1997): 219–32.This reading is consistent with my analysis of Romantic space in chapter 7.

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“and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant”.21 He then calls for the sun to reveal the position of Moby Dick to him as well. Ishmael is also marked with signs connected to the whale. His tattoo resembles the measurements of the whale.22 In a different chapter Ahab is again occupied with tracing Moby Dick on a chart “till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead”.23 The chart on Ahab is a self-marking, a diagrammatic sign of the position of the self in the world, but it also inscribes the self onto the whale and the whale onto the self. Ahab (and to a certain degree Ishmael) himself becomes a spatial representation of the sea, the self, and the whale. The return of the whale’s part to its body, the return of the mark to its natural origin, and whaleAhab-map comprise a unity of the sign that transgresses the borders between the signifier (leg) and signified (whale) by uniting them. Ahab’s other body-mark also links him to the whale: “Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.”24 This mark links Ahab to the whale through its whiteness. An entire chapter dedicated to the whiteness of the whale emphasizes that color’s significance, a color that signifies both good and evil, nothingness and transcendence. Ahab is marked by whiteness as a tree is branded by lightning.25 His transgressive desire has left a trace on his own body that links him to the whale. The origin of the sign is unknown and speculation about it is a taboo among the crew. Only two contradicting opinions are offered. One suggests that he sustained it in an “elemental strife at sea”, the other that it is a birth-mark.26 The narrator himself does not know, but makes clear that finding out the truth about the mark is impossible. It remains as mysterious, though not as significant, as Queequeg’s tattoos.

The whale Ahab’s second body-mark not only links him to the whale through its whiteness, but also through its mysteriousness. Mysteriousness is the very thing Ahab loathes about Moby Dick. He sees all visible things as a pasteboard mask. To understand anything 21 22 23 24 25 26

Melville, Moby-Dick, 501. See ibid., 451. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 123. The other function of this mark and its semantic field of fire is that it points to Ahab’s Promethean character and his later encounters with thunder, lightning, and the corposants. See ibid., 123. Ibid., 124.

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one has to strike through the mask: “How can a prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. […] That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate…”.27 Moby Dick is inscrutable for two reasons: first of all because he is a white wall, a monster without a face, and second because he is also covered in mysterious hieroglyphic signs.28 Standing in front of a white wall is like facing a border and nothingness at the same time. The whale’s mask is a huge white wall to Ahab that needs to be transgressed because the truth lies behind and “[t]ruth has no confines”.29 For Ahab, Moby Dick signifies both truth and the inscrutable. The ending of the novel shows how destructive this semiotic tension can be. It tears the mad captain apart and leaves him with only one option: he must become whale. Just before he describes Moby Dick as a white wall, Ahab explains to his crew that it was the white whale that “dismasted” him, and standing on his whale-leg he emits a loud “animal sob”.30 His process of becominganimal has begun, and he will become whale by the end of the novel. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Ahab’s desire for becoming-whale stems from the encounter with the exceptional individual Moby Dick, who is exceptional because he is “a phemomenon of bordering”; “he is the borderline”.31 They quote the passage in which Ahab describes the white whale as a white wall with nothing beyond it. The idea of a borderline and the white wall can be further developed by taking into account that Moby Dick is also a white wall because he does not have a face. Moby Dick’s facelessness is described as a white wall by Ishmael as well. In an attempt to describe the sperm whale’s head, he explains that his eyes and ears are at the side and his nose, the spout, on top, leaving the front of his head, where the human face would be, empty: “Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale’s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.”32 This “dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall”33 is, if one applies Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the face, only one part of a face. A face consists of the white wall of signification and the black holes of subjectification. Breaking through the wall means to attain a body without organs, to become animal, to be asignifying. 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 164. Dryden attributes two different semiotic functions to the hieroglyphics and the whiteness of the whale. While hieroglyphics need to be deciphered, the “white object neither requires nor invites interpretation”. Edgar A. Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form. The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968) 101. Partially, this assumption corresponds to my argument, but I would also treat the whiteness as a plane for projection (as Ahab does) and therefore as a trigger for unlimited (and consequently impossible) interpretation. Melville, Moby-Dick, 164. Ibid., 163. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 270. Melville, Moby-Dick, 336f. Ibid., 337.

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The depiction of Moby Dick is somewhere in between the body without organs and the face. The whale still stands for something else, thus he signifies. His white wall fulfils exactly the function Deleuze and Guattari attribute to signifying systems: unlimited semiosis.34 The whale could be good or evil because its whiteness allows for multiple projections just as a white wall allows various ideas to be projected onto it. The whale does not have a normal or a complete face because he is already beyond the concept of subjectivity. The whale is a pack, a multiplicity, or a concept. He is already something different than an animal because he does not fit the category of the face. Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg is so frightening because his face does not conform to the usual concepts of faciality. The whale heightens this fear by further dismantling the face. The difference between the dismantling of the face that Deleuze and Guattari describe as a desirable goal and the dismantling of the face that occurs in the novel is what lies behind the face. Quoting D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze and Guattari explain that Melville wanted to go back to presignifying and presubjective semiotics by seeking refuge in a nostalgic return to the savage, but a true dismantling of the face cannot mean turning back.35 Instead, one has to make use of the wall and the holes within that wall to create lines of flight which lead to new and creative connections. Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari are partially right in their assumption that Melville wants to return to an older and better semiotic system. Presignifying semiotics, which is the idea of original and natural language,36 is evoked in several places, but there is also awareness that it might be lost forever. What remains of natural language are hieroglyphic signs, or white walls that we can no longer decipher, or that produce more signs without definite signifieds. Somewhere behind this white wall, however, lurks the truth. The desire for truth is the real difference between Romantic semiotics and Deleuze and Guattari, whose diagrammatic, or defacialized, regime is about an absolute that has nothing to do with truth. Ishmael and Ahab, however, are both looking for the truth in the white whale and the white wall. They both know that attaining the truth can only be achieved by coming as close to the whale as possible, by becomingwhale. While Ahab hunts the whale physically (and mythically), Ishmael hunts him intellectually by describing and dissecting him.37 In one respect, their approach to the whale is similar to that of Deleuze and Guattari: breaking through the white wall, becoming-whale, becoming a body without organs is 34

35 36 37

Despite the signifying force of the whale, the lack of a face also contributes to the notions about absence and silence that Ishmael evokes in relation to Moby Dick. See Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 98. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 208f. See chapter 2. Gabriele Schwab understands this division between intellect and quest as a mixture between myth and rationalization that characterizes Moby-Dick as a text on the verge of Modernism. See Gabriele Schwab, Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen. Zur Subjektivität im modernen Roman (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1987) 85f. Taking the ambivalent semiotics of Romanticism into account, this double quest could also be viewed as an effect of semiotic tensions.

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understood to be a dangerous undertaking. After describing the sperm whale as a white wall, Ishmael addresses the reader: “For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell [sic] the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Sais?”38 In Schiller’s poem the youth was petrified and perished soon afterwards.39 In Novalis’s notes to Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs, the youth sees only a reflection of himself and the reader does not quite know how this affects him. Those who try to look into the secret of the head almost die in the process.40 Ahab often sees himself under the veil, but in the end he perishes. Melville’s employment and development of the familiar metaphor situates him once more in the semiotic discourse of his time. In the context of liminal Romantic semiotics, the notion of the veil of Sais belongs to the realm of language games and unattainable truth. Death and truth coincide most radically at the end of the novel when becoming-whale signifies the total loss of subjectivity. His marks are contrasted with the white emptiness of the whale. Queequeg’s and Ahab’s marks have meaning but remain indecipherable. Marks like these can also be found on whale bodies. The whale is therefore not only a white wall that tempts Ahab to break through it and become-whale, but also a white wall with writing on it that tempts the reader to try to decipher the whale. The Chilean whale is “marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back”41 and the sperm whale even has two skins. One is transparent (“the skin of the skin”)42 and the other is “crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array”.43 But the second skin with the lines on it is only the ground “for far other delineations”.44 “These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics”.45 They remind Ishmael of the old Indian hieroglyphics on the banks of the Mississippi. “Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.”46 Just like Queequeg, the whale has signs on his body and his face. To Ishmael the combination of the white wall with hieroglyphics makes the sperm whale god-like: “For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

Melville, Moby-Dick, 338. For a detailed account of the veil metaphor, the Schiller poem, and Novalis’s text see chapter 2. Melville generally considers truth to be a threat to sanity and life as Edgar A. Dryden shows. In his review “Hawthorne and his Mosses”, Melville compares the truth to a white doe that we only get a fleeting impression of in great literature, such as in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, the mad heroes are able to speak the truth. See Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 26. Melville, Moby-Dick, 205. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 306.

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face, he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles…”.47 Just like Queequeg, the whale does not communicate his truth: Queequeg because he does not know it, the whale because he does not speak at all. Who then is to decipher the signs on the whale – the object of the novel? Who can read the signs? Ishmael, once more, demonstrates his knowledge of semiotics by alluding to Jean Françoise Champollion who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and thereby found a way to read hieroglyphics:48 “Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face.”49 He continues to argue that “unlettered Ishmael” may certainly not hope to read the sperm whale’s brow, and defiantly concludes the chapter with the words, “I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can”.50 This is a first indication of how the semiotics in the novel is connected to the semiotics of the novel. In much the same way as Ishmael tries to decipher Queequeg, Ahab, and the whale, the reader is called to decipher what is put before him or her. Since it is not the real brow of the sperm whale but only its semiotic representation that is presented to the reader, he or she has to decipher this semiotic representation, i.e. the novel itself. Deciphering the whale and deciphering the novel are equally difficult because of the processes of a-limitation that are at work. Queequeg, Ahab, and the whale bear bodysigns that cannot be deciphered because Ishmael lacks the code and because all three of them are engaged in other processes of spatial and subject a-limitation. Queequeg merges with objects and with Ishmael himself, Ahab is becoming-whale, and the faceless whale himself is too close to the divine, too much a part of the infinite ocean to subject to a delimitation of his boundaries or a reading of his marks. Nevertheless, the implication is that the marks signify something that Ishmael is at times desperately trying to discover, while at other times he dejectedly gives in to the hermetic semiotic system.

47 48

49 50

Ibid., 346. Many of the important works of the American Renaissance mention Champollion. After his discoveries, an Egyptian revival took place in North America. See John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics. The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980) 3. Irwin identifies “hieroglyphic doubling” as a concept that links different characters through the hieroglyphics and other allusions to Egyptian culture. He uses the Isis and Osiris myth to interpret the dialectical relation of good and evil and life and death in Moby-Dick pointing to the employment of similar metaphors and myths in Mardi, Pierre, and The Confidence Man as well as in other Romantic works. The hieroglyphic doubling also implies a doubling of the subject, i.e. the inconsistency of the self. See 285–350. Melville, Moby-Dick, 347. Ibid., 347.

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Naming and reading: Adamic language and “The Doubloon” The depiction of body-signs illustrates the semiotic tension present in Romanticism. The two other areas I would like to discuss in this section, the connection between name and subject and the desire for interpretation, are also affected by this tension. Naming is, as the first sentence of the novel indicates, a matter of significance in Moby-Dick. It is also the semiotic area in which the belief in natural signs and Adamic language is the strongest. There are many reasons why Ishmael proposes to his reader to call him Ishmael. One of them is the biblical meaning of the name. Ishmael is the subaltern son of Abraham, who is outcast into the desert but nevertheless survives and later founds Islam. The implications of this name for the narrator have been discussed many times before. He, too, is an outcast, driven to sea by his melancholia, playing only a minor role in his own tale but surviving, orphaned, to tell it.51 His name is well chosen and reflected upon as are the other names in the novel. When Ishmael decides to ship the Pequod and hears of its captain’s name he is told that “Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king”.52 Ishmael replies, “And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?”53 Peleg forbids him to speak of Ahab in this way and argues in the captain’s defence that he did not name himself after the evil king and that Ishmael should not wrong him “because he happens to have a wicked name”.54 Like the other allusive names, Ahab lives up to his label. He takes what he should not take and dies. Aunt Charity’s name perfectly characterizes her as well: “Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity” because she works to make the Pequod a little more comfortable (although her ginger is discarded in favor of stronger medicine later on).55 The ship that lost a child is called Rachel after the biblical Rachel who mourns for the lost children of Israel. The accurate naming of characters and objects is interesting because it points directly to Adamic language. Adam named all the beasts according to their characteristics. His names, because conveyed to him by God’s power, perfectly suit the animals. In this regard, Moby-Dick is a return to original language theories – not only on the story or discourse level, but also 51

52 53 54 55

The ambiguity of the first sentence implies that Ishmael is not really his name. While this points to a crossing of subject boundaries in the sense of leaving an old self or identity behind (See Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 85), it also suggests a linguistic adaptation to the truth. Since Ishmael is an outcast, he must have an appropriate name. Even in this famous opening of the novel, a tension between dissolution and coherence can be felt. It has also been argued that Ishmael does not fulfil the portent of his name because he is connected to other beings in the world (ibid., 86f.). I would contend that the nomadic nature of whale-hunting and the existence beyond normal society as well as the ending of the novel, where Ishmael is left alone on the ocean to be rescued as sole survivor, does give some truth to the name. Melville, Moby-Dick, 79. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 96.

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on the level of the implied author. The coherent naming contrasts with all the other ambiguous signs, but also fuels the desire for interpretation. The slightest hint that there is coherence and sense in the world creates the wish to experience sense and to make sense. Wanting to make sense, the desire for interpretation, presupposes that there is sense in the world. At the beginning of chapter 99, “The Doubloon”, in which several people deliver an interpretation of a golden coin nailed to the mast by Ahab as reward for the first to sing out (meaning to spot and announce) Moby Dick, Ishmael proclaims, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher…”.56 What follows is well known. Depending on their character and background, Ahab, the mates, the crew, Queequeg, Fedallah, and Pip all provide different interpretations. The procedure is known from Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg. In “The Doubloon” several protagonists attempt an interpretation demonstrating the pragmatic side of semiotics. The sign is not a dyad but a triad that includes an interpretant generating new signs and endless meanings. Different people bring different intertexts to the semiosis (religious symbols, calendars, songs, their own body-marks, etc.). It would be reductive to assume that meaning-making rests with the reader. Just as the slightly frustrated Ishmael presents the whale’s brow to the reader, challenging her to understand it on her own, he now presents the reader with different versions of the coin’s meaning, letting him choose his favorite one. Ishmael withdraws from the reader over the course of the chapter presenting her with different narrative layers (like the layers of the whale’s skin). First he observes Ahab, who sees himself in the coin (like the novice of Sais in Novalis’s version). Then Starbuck appears without any narrative mediation. Then Stubb stays with the reader to report on the other interpreters. The last words of the chapter are not spoken, as usual, by the narrator, but by the little AfricanAmerican boy Pip, who, having lost his mind, explains pragmatics with wit and wisdom by conjugating the verb ‘look’. Between the coin and the reader stand Ishmael, Stubb, and the person interpreting the coin. The reader has to cross too many boundaries to find any sense. Semiotic a-limitation becomes an approximative process, which I will discuss in detail in the section on embedded narratives. The doubloon chapter is often understood as the key semiotic text of the novel that shows that there is no single truth in signs and that the entire novel is, in fact, full of frustrating or ambiguous processes of interpretation because it is resounding with the desire to interpret. When the corposants trouble the crew, Stubb interprets them as an omen suggesting that the whole ship will be so full of whale oil that the masts will burn like three candles. Ahab interprets them as white flames leading to the white whale.57 His white leg, his white mark, the white fire, and the white whale are combined by 56 57

Ibid., 430. See ibid., 506f.

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Ahab’s monomaniac semiotics that only have two signifieds, Ahab and the whale, which are merged into one signified through interpretation: becoming-whale. Ahab merges with the fire, he feels the lightening flash through his skull and calls out to the fire, “I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee…”.58 He seeks to become the powerful whiteness that the whale also is. Ishmael, despite choosing the fluid medium of water or sperm for his subject a-limitation, is similarly obsessed with interpretation. Whether it is the architecture of a church in the beginning of the novel, Queequeg’s appearance, Ahab’s name, or the whale in general, Ishmael tries hard to make sense of his narrative world by employing a number of intertexts, just like the spectators of the doubloon do. Ishmael only dwells on the signs on Queequeg, Ahab, himself, and the whale because he wants them to be significant. He is caught in the liminal semiotics of Romanticism, in a border zone where meaning may be possible, but difficult to find and to produce. In this regard, Moby-Dick really is an adventure story – borderline semiosis is an adventure.

Uncanny ekphrasis: pictures of whales and demons Moby-Dick: dark paintings The semiotics of a-limitation defined by the in-between of unified and meaningful signs and indecipherable, multiple meanings instigates a desire for interpretation and challenges Ishmael to employ different devices in order to make sense. I discussed Ishmael’s process of making sense of Queequeg by trying to ascertain the meaning of the patterns on his skin. He knows they represent the truth (or at least a way of attaining the truth), but he cannot understand them. Indeed, those truthful signs may resist the translation into another, verbal semiotic system: “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”59 Ishmael comes to this conclusion when he sees Queequeg withering away as death draws ever closer and the tattooed sailor seems bound to take the truth to his grave. The whale poses the same language problem. Not only does the whale have hieroglyphics on his skin like Queequeg, his inside also looks like a labyrinth.60 The same metaphor is employed for Queequeg’s tattoos. However, neither Queequeg nor the whale can help Ishmael decipher the hieroglyphics, or guide him through the labyrinth of their body-signs. Like Queequeg, the whale remains silent about his secrets. In fact,

58 59 60

Ibid., 508. Ibid., 477. See ibid., 371.

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the whale, according to Ishmael, “has no voice”.61 For Ishmael this is only logical because he would not have much to say: “Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”62 This humorous remark is a language critique. Ishmael describes the vapour of the whale’s spout as “engendered by his incommunicable contemplations” looking as if “Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts”.63 The divine truth of the whale is sealed so that a verbal semiotic system can have no access to it. Where words are insufficient to communicate the truth, an epistemological quester is forced to resort to other semiotic systems. Language critique is usually associated with Modernism and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous letter written in the voice of Lord Chandos, in which the writer tells Francis Bacon that words are falling apart in his mouth like mouldering mushrooms. Other Modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot use a fragmented, highly intertextual language to solve the problem of not being able to represent the modern world with normal language. Ishmael is writing a book about whales in verbal language and he is aware of its limitations: “I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship…”64 Painting with words is not the best solution. Each approach to the whale ends in a crisis of representation. The whale’s back is as problematic as his face. Ishmael already knows how to solve a language crisis: keep writing and test other or new semiotic systems. Like Hofmannsthal, he seems to put some faith in iconic signs. After all, iconic signs are much closer to original language than is arbitrary verbal language. The hieroglyphics on Queequeg and the whale are derived from iconic signs, but remain indecipherable. What about images such as pictures? They are motivated and directly linked to what they denote through a relation of similarity. If one were to draw a picture of the whale, would not that be a good way of understanding him? Ishmael’s first encounter with the whale is through a picture of the creature. In the Spouter-Inn he sees an old oil painting that is difficult to decipher. It requires “diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors” and “the aggregated opinions of many aged persons” to ascertain what is depicted in the “besmoked, and in every way defaced” picture.65 The description of this first whalesemiosis is one of unlimited semiosis. The representamen is so unclear and invested with “a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity” that after looking at it for a while, people develop a strong desire “to find out what that marvellous painting

61 62 63 64 65

Ibid., 372. Ibid., 372. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 12f.

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meant”.66 Several attempts to make sense of it produce different new signs. There is an uncanny secrecy that draws Ishmael to the picture and makes him describe it to his reader in symbols. Ishmael is not the only one who is fascinated by the painting. Several interpretative attempts by other people engage the old oil painting in a process of open semiosis. The openness lies in its own indefinite signification. The conclusion Ishmael arrives at is that a whale, trying to jump over a boat, impales himself in the three mastheads. It seems to be a grotesque and unlikely picture, but nevertheless it is so fascinating that it must be interpreted, whether it is truthful or not. Before Ishmael describes the real whale later in the novel, he proposes to take a look at some pictures. Just as the protagonist Ishmael first encounters the whale through an iconic sign, the reader has her first descriptive encounter through the discussion of iconic representations of the whale: “It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him…”.67 The semiotic process Ishmael experiences is projected onto the reader. However, the uncanny ekphrasis of the first whale picture is, at first glance, not repeated for the reader. Instead, the narrating Ishmael proclaims: “It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong”.68 This time, truthfulness in the sense of proximity between representamen and object, i.e. iconic similarity, is a criterion for the evaluation of pictures. Mythical pictures are discarded, as are scientific delineations, because they are incorrect representations. Ishmael tries to explain this untruthfulness through the remoteness of the object: “The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters”69 and can therefore hardly be portrayed truthfully by anyone. Skeletons or small whales, which can be hoisted on deck, are not really adequate substitutes (though Ishmael will use them himself later in the novel to describe the whale). He comes to the frustrating conclusion that the “Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.”70 Pictures do not seem to fulfill their promise of being closer to their object than language. Ishmael’s second ekphrasis ends with the discarding of iconic signs. The only way to find out “what the whale really looks like” is “by going a whaling yourself” and this way is dangerous as “you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.”71 The conflation of representamen and object, the only true iconic sign that is no longer a sign, is both deadly and desired. The discussion of the whale pictures exemplifies the difficulty of interpreting signs that do not rely on accurate representation or the desire for truth and representation. The dark and defaced picture that invited the spectator to engage in interpretation did not 66 67 68 69 70 71

Ibid., 12f. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 264.

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have the claim to denote but to signify. The oil painting does not suffice as a representation of the whale. Ishmael introduces the reader to pictures of the whale that lay claim to mimetic representation. These pictures are the logical consequence of Ishmael’s desire for interpretation and representation that seems yet to be unfulfilled. After the devastating conclusion of the chapter “Monstrous Pictures of Whales”, Ishmael turns to less “erroneous” and “true pictures” in the next two chapters. The pictures described in chapter 56 “Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes” are not completely correct either. Some seem lifelike and correct in some respects, but deficient in others. Ishmael praises one painting in particular that describes a whaling scene: “The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and true.”72 Yet, “[s]erious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this whale”73 so that even this finest picture is flawed. Ishmael does not admire the correct details or exact outlines of the whales but the action, the spirit, and the effect of the picture. The second chapter demonstrates that correct representation to the point of the near conflation of object and sign is unattainable. The subsequent, and final, chapter on iconic signs of the whale departs even further from the idea of mimetic representation. Here the truthfulness of whale-signs is attributed to the circumstances of their creation. Ishmael has told the reader before that she will have to go whaling if she wants to know what a whale looks like. The hunters of the whale, those closest to his nature, are also the most apt to create truthful signs of him: “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois.”74 This savage is a construction that Deleuze and Guattari would call a nomad. He is somebody who moves through smooth space and creates open artworks.75 He can create the most suggestive and evocative designs of the whale because he is not only close to nature and the whale, but also because he is close to the original state of man. In the context of Romantic sign theories, the original state of man implies the original state of language. The savage (whether white or not) is therefore capable of using natural signs to depict the whale which bear more truth than scientific attempts to reproduce the whale on canvas. The border that is crossed is that

72 73 74 75

Ibid., 266. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 270. Niels Werber also makes the connection between the sea as smooth space and the whale-hunter as a nomad. Ahab and his crew are engaged in a struggle for life and death on the lawless ocean. There are no striations on the ocean, only ambivalent freedom. In tracking the whale (and not following normal routes), the Pequod leaves order and structure behind and becomes nomadic as well. See Niels Werber, Die Geopolitik der Literatur. Eine Vermessung der medialen Raumordnung (München: Hanser, 2007) 103–36.

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between nature and culture.76 The sign merges with its object, not through absolute likeness, but through signification. Mimetic representation is no longer an issue when the sign user has a command of natural language. The complete dissolution of the boundaries between nature and semiotics is achieved in the final paragraphs of the last chapter on the pictures of whales. Fantastic groupings of rocks on plains can look like whales. The “thorough whaleman” can perceive whales in mountain ridges and in star formations. The whale has merged with natural space. From artificially created pictures via affectively true pictures to nomadic artworks and finally to signs that entirely rely on interpretation, Ishmael has returned to his original pictorial experience of the whale. The dark oil painting only becomes the depiction of a whale through continued interpretation. The vast, sublime spaces of the plain, the mountains, and the stars are as infinite as the sign of the whale and as borderless as the subject of Ishmael’s book. There is no entity that intentionally creates a sign of the whale in these spaces. It is through interpretation alone that the whale is created. Ishmael’s attempts to portray the whale through icons end in a-limitation. Not only does the whale as sign merge with space, only the “whaleman” can see this dissolution of semiotic and natural boundaries. The “whaleman” is already an unusual compound used only in the early eighteenth and a few times in the nineteenth century and even then it is commonly hyphenated. The linguistic proximity of man and whale reflects the processes of subject a-limitation that they undergo during the hunt as described by Ishmael at the first lowering for the whale: “Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together”.77 The man who is as close to the whale as is possible, the man who merges with the whale in his hunt, this man can interpret the natural and boundless signs of the whale. The uncanny nature of Ishmael’s ekphrasis of iconic whale signs lies in the combination of proximity and vastness. In the first case, the dark canvas shows us blurry and indistinct shapes on the infinite ocean. Someone familiar with whaling interprets them as the piercing of the whale by the three mastheads of a ship. Similar mechanisms are at work in the other example: the landscape suddenly turns into a whale for the man who is already becoming-whale. In Moby-Dick, ekphrasis is part of semiotics but also of spatial and of subject a-limitation.

76

77

Stuart M. Frank identifies a progression from error to truth that is based on proximity to nature. It is also a progression from the abstract and theoretical towards the experimental. He understands this progression as a descent or reversion to a natural or savage state of existence. See Stuart M. Frank, Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery. Sources and Types of the ‘Pictorial’ Chapters of Moby-Dick (Fairhaven: Edwards J. Lefkowicz, 1986) xvii–xxi. One could also connect this reversed progression to a reversal of language development. Melville, Moby-Dick, 224.

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Melmoth: the portrait becomes alive Ekphrasis itself is an ontological device of semiotic boundary crossings. One semiotic system is translated into another. The iconic sign is translated into a symbol (arbitrary and conventional language). The differences between the two sign systems and questions of the superiority of either system are part of a long-lasting debate that was also relevant for Romantic discourses. The most prominent example is John Keats’s famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which visual art, verbal language, and life compete against each other.78 Despite the advantages of visual art it seems just as enigmatic as arbitrary language. I would like to explore two contradictory concepts of the iconic sign: the iconic sign as a truthful, natural representation based on similarity and the iconic sign as an enigmatic, indecipherable, and uncanny sign. In order to get a broader view of the relation between ekphrasis and semiotic a-limitation, I will route this exploration through the frequently employed device of ekphrasis in other Romantic texts from Germany and England. While the semiotic whale seems to remain only an approximation of the real (true) whale in Moby-Dick, a boundary that is approached but never transgressed to allow for any description of its beyond, other Romantic texts cross the line and conflate the sign and its object. Two examples from Irish and German Romanticism, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Joseph von Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), both extremely uncanny, tell of this semiotic transgression. Just as Ishmael’s first encounter with the whale is mediated through a dark and defaced oil painting of the leviathan, young John Melmoth’s first encounter with the devil takes place via the fiend’s old and mouldy portrait. John visits his uncle at his death-bed and discovers in a dark, locked chamber a portrait of his ancestor, dated 1646, which he is to destroy along with a mouldy manuscript that tells part of the story of Melmoth, the figure in the painting. Both portrait and manuscript are signs that tell John something about his ancestor. Though they do not tell him the truth, they do excite a desire to know more. The portrait fascinates John because it merges with its object. When he first enters the dark chamber, which has been locked for a long time, John immediately spots the portrait: “John’s eyes were in a moment, and as if by magic, riveted on a portrait that hung on the wall”.79 The portrait is aesthetically superior to most other family portraits, but there is nothing remarkable about the middle-aged man except for his eyes that fill John with “stupid horror”.80 When his uncle tells him that the man in the portrait is still alive, John does not believe him. How could a man who lived 150 years ago still be alive? John is not superstitious, but “urged by an impulse for which he did not attempt 78 79 80

See chapter 4. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 17. Ibid., 18.

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to account to himself, caught up the miserable light, and once more ventured into the forbidden room”.81 This time he “thought he saw the eyes of the portrait, on which his own was fixed, move”.82 An iconic sign can only represent certain aspects of its object. Movement can be intimated through sophisticated technique, but can never really be part of the sign. One of the main points of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is the fact that the scenes on the urn are frozen. Melmoth the Wanderer’s portrait transgresses semiotic boundaries because it can move. This movement is the first indication of a conflation between sign and object. The conflation of sign and object continues when the object itself makes an appearance that is logically impossible. A figure that looks like the man in the portrait materializes at the uncle’s death-bed. John tries to convince himself that it is “doubtless only a likeness”,83 but the familiarity with which the figure nods to him terrifies him nonetheless. The sign that should not move and should represent something absent suddenly refers to something present. If the inscription under the painting is correct (J. Melmoth, 1646), it is impossible to encounter that object in the year 1816. The likeness, the familiarity of the painting, and its living object are the uncanny features of Maturin’s semiotics. They have the same effect on John as the liminal semiotics has on Ishmael: “Curiosity, or something that perhaps deserves a better name, the wild and awful pursuit of an indefinite object, had taken strong hold of his mind”.84 The fascination with the inscrutable leaves John no choice but to rely on additional semiotic sources. He wants to know more, experience more (semiotic) transgressions, but he fears them at the same time. He walks up and down in his late uncle’s room “approaching the door of the closet, and then retreating from it”.85 This spatial representation of attempted or desired transgression shows his reluctance to cross into the space of uncanny semiotics because the transgression of the spatial boundary represented by the threshold would coincide with the decision to engage with transgressive signs. John decides to rely on words first. The uncanny nature of the portrait is confirmed by the story of the old sibyl Biddy Brannigan who tells him that his ancestor Melmoth the Traveller seems to appear whenever someone gloomy and fearful dies in the family. The tale increases his curiosity and his terror even more and results in the resolution to enter the closet and read the other sign that is left of Melmoth, the manuscript. The manuscript fails to tell the truth about Melmoth because it is full of gaps. It is old, “discoloured, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of the reader”.86 Whenever something significant about Melmoth is about to be revealed, the manuscript becomes illegible. Melmoth’s face remains averted, his 81 82 83 84 85 86

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21f. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 28.

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voice often silenced as in this passage, in which a stranger (presumably Melmoth) laughs at the tragic death of a bride and bridegroom in a storm: The stranger, slowly turning round, and disclosing a countenance which ----- (Here the manuscript was illegible for a few lines), said in English ----- (A long hiatus followed here, and the next passage that was legible, though it proved to be a continuation of the narrative, was but a fragment).87

The manuscript tells the story of Stanton, who followed Melmoth the Wanderer through Spain and England and almost became a victim of his temptations which are substituted by ----- or * * * * in the novel and which are illegible in the manuscript. It ends with Stanton speaking of his desire to meet Melmoth again and to look for him in Ireland: “Perhaps our final meeting will be in * * * * * * *”.88 After having read the manuscript, John looks at the portrait feeling as if the iconic Melmoth had substituted the illegible passages and the place of the next meeting was the very closet in which John Melmoth is sitting: “Melmoth felt for a moment as if he were about to receive an explanation from [Melmoth’s portrait’s] lips.”89 Even when he rips the portrait off the wall and tears it to pieces, “[t]here was no voice, nor any that answered”.90 The iconic sign does not speak; it seems to smile in the face of its destruction, and “Melmoth felt horror indescribable at this transient and imaginary resuscitation of the figure”.91 The silence of the iconic sign is transgressed when, after its destruction, it becomes its object. Melmoth himself enters the room and whispers to John, “You have burned me, then; but those are flames I can survive. – I am alive, – I am beside you.”92 The uncanny sign is replaced by its object and, at the end of the novel, the object dies. Melmoth the Wanderer seems to be born from his iconic sign, but also seems to die through its destruction.93 The subject Melmoth is bound to the sign Melmoth. In fact, the true subject only makes brief appearances at the beginning and at the end of the novel; all other references are mediated through tales of him. In the first chapters of the novel, there is a constant oscillation between Melmoth the being (as subject in the world and as object of the sign) and Melmoth the iconic sign (the portrait) or the symbolic sign (the manuscript). When the portrait is destroyed, the subject makes its appearance. There remains some ambiguity as to whether Melmoth really appears or whether John just dreams about him, until the reader is told of an indexical sign in the form of bruises on John’s wrist that point to Melmoth’s presence. Melmoth’s sign comes to life and the

87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 60. The conflation of sign and object, which is also a conflation of sign and subject, inspired one of Maturin’s relatives, Oscar Wilde, to write extensively on a young man and his portrait.

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destruction of the sign foreshadows the destruction of its object. Thus, the boundaries between the subject Melmoth (object of the sign) and the sign are blurred.

Das Marmorbild: becoming-sign The blurring of the boundaries between the representamen, or the signifier, and the object, or the referent, is hinted at in Melmoth the Wanderer while in Moby-Dick the boundaries between sign and nature are actually transgressed. In Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), both kinds of semiotic a-limitation take place. The novella tells the story of Florio’s visit to Lucca and his encounter with a beautiful woman who seems to be an animated marble statue. The story begins when Florio approaches the city and is invited to join the festivities on a meadow outside the city gates. He walks among the celebrating people who are drinking, talking, singing, and playing, and soon feels drawn to a young girl. His perception of the festivities is to be walking among “ewigwechselnden Bildern” (an ever-changing tableau).94 This implies that we see the surroundings through the signs in Florio’s mind and that the narrator does not give us an objective account of reality. Whatever Florio perceives immediately turns into an image in his mind so that he is literally walking among images. The process of semiosis, the transformation of objects into images in the mind, becomes apparent when, later that night, Florio reflects upon the girl he has met. Feeling too restless to sleep, he leaves the inn and thinks about the evening: Die Musik bei den Zelten, der Traum auf seinem Zimmer, und sein, die Klänge und den Traum und die zierliche Erscheinung des Mädchens, nachträumendes Herz hatte ihr Bild unmerklich und wundersam verwandelt in ein viel schöneres, größeres und herrliches, wie er es noch nirgend gesehen.95 (The music from the tents, the dream in his room, and his heart that dreamed about the music and the delicate appearance of the girl had impalpably and magically transformed her image into a more beautiful, magnificent and exquisite one than he had ever seen before.)

The object is transformed into an interpretant or signifier, an image of the object in Florio’s mind. During the process of semiosis, i.e. while thinking about the image of the object, the image changes. Eichendorff illustrates what Peirce described as unlimited semiosis, or the idea that from every symbol a new symbol is born. The image of the innocent girl with flowers in her hair and a blushing countenance turns into something grander. Florio’s imagination produces a sign that provides a transition between the

94 95

Joseph von Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, eds. Wolfgang Frühwald and Brigitte Schillbach (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007) 387. Ibid., 396f.

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pretty girl he saw at the festival and the uncanny statue he is about to see in the secret garden.96 Florio continues his midnight stroll until he reaches a pond at whose bank stands a white marble statue of the goddess Venus. He is fascinated by the statue because it seems to represent the image of his ideal lover, which he has been imagining since the days of his early youth. The image of the innocent girl is thus transformed into that of a beautiful unknown woman and augmented to the ideal woman in the figure of the marble Venus. As he continues to stare at the figure it seems to him as if “sich die Lippen bewegen zum Gruße, als blühe Leben wie ein lieblicher Gesang erwärmend durch die schönen Glieder herauf”97 (her lips were moving to greet him, as if life were blossoming within her beautiful limbs like a lovely song). The coming to life of the icon, which is a common feature in Romanticism, does not scare him at first, yet he needs to close his eyes because of his strong emotions.98 The uncanny quality of the encounter becomes apparent when he opens his eyes again and the Venus is silent, white, and still. Instead, nature comes to life: the trees seem to whisper to him and try to catch him with their long shadows as he runs to escape the animated icons and the animated speaking nature. In Das Marmorbild, a direct connection is visible between the merging of sign and object in the animation of the statue into a living Venus and the animation of trees that start to speak. The three dimensions of sign, subject, and space are involved in a process of a-limitation. This transgression between signifier and referent, between nature and semiotics, is uncanny, but, as in the cases of Ishmael and John Melmoth, also instigates the desire for further experiences of a-limitation: “Ein tiefes, unbestimmtes Verlangen war von den Erscheinungen der Nacht in seiner Seele zurück geblieben“99 (The occurrences of the night had left a deep, indefinite desire in his soul). In order to repeat the experience, Florio retraces his steps the following morning. By chance, he finds himself in a secret garden and hears the sound of a lute fading into the noise of a fountain. Again, the boundary between semiotics and nature is permeable. The natural lute is played by a beautiful woman whom he recognizes as the statue of Venus. Confused and deeply moved, he walks through the garden of indecipherable signs past some half-discernible images on a wall until he meets a knight mumbling dark words Florio does not understand. Florio oscillates between bliss and fear and develops an obsession with the marble statue: “Das schöne Mamorbild war ja lebend geworden” (the beautiful marble 96

97 98

99

This semiotic reading coincides with the psychoanalytic reading of the scene as introjection, displacement, and projection. See Lothar Pikulik, “Die Mythisierung des Geschlechtstriebes in Eichendorffs Das Marmorbild,” Euphorion. Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 71.2 (1977): 132. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 397. The animation of statues is a common motif in Romantic literature. See Winfried Woesler, “Frau Venus und das schöne Mädchen mit dem Blumenkranze. Zu Eichendorffs ‘Marmorbild’,” Aurora. Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 45 (1985): 34ff. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 399.

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statue had indeed come to life) and everything around him seems to be “ein Bild der Schönen” (an image of the beautiful woman).100 The two semiotic transgressions, the dissolution of boundaries between sign and object (the uncanny ekphrasis) and the dissolution of boundaries between sign and nature or space, occur several times in the novella and are usually accompanied by words or images that Florio cannot understand.101 At a fancy dress party, the same process of semiotic a-limitation takes place. The pretty girl is doubled into a beautiful image, she seems increasingly taller and more precious until she becomes a beautiful woman and finally starts turning into the marble statue again.102 Once more, the landscape is described as an indecipherable sign, as wonderfully entwined hieroglyphics. Thus, I would identify a semiotic chain of becoming here: pretty girl – taller and beautiful girl – beautiful woman/marble statue. The girl’s boundaries are so blurry, her status as subject is so undefined, that she can easily be transformed into something larger and more desirable.103 The desire for the enigmatic woman and her strange iconic counterpart, however, is too dangerous for Florio. The image of desire becomes omnipresent in Florio’s final encounter with the Venus. In her castle, all paintings seem to depict her, and while she seems to revert to the state of marble statue, all other paintings and statues come to life. Florio’s horror reaches its climax when he suddenly sees himself in the knights on the tapestry. Perhaps, his own image on the wall frightens him because he is about to become a sign and to enter into the process of semiotic transformation the marble woman is already engaged in. Becoming a sign entails losing his individuality and becoming transformable, changeable, and thinkable. Florio wants to remain a subject and thus quits the uncanny castle and decides to leave Lucca. When Florio finally listens to his friend Fortunato who tells him “nehmet die Blumen des Lebens fröhlich wie sie der Augenblick gibt, und forscht nicht nach den Wurzeln im Grunde, denn unten ist es freudlos und still”104 (take the flowers of life as they exist in the moment, and do not search for their roots in the ground because it is grave and silent 100

Ibid., 404. Lothar Pikulik explains this identification of subject and object as mythical thinking. See Pikulik, “Die Mythisierung des Geschlechtstriebes in Eichendorffs Das Marmorbild,” 138. 102 See Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 408–14. 103 Most analyses of Das Marmorbild read the novella as an allegory. Both women are seen as allegorical representations of certain female attributes. Woesler, “Frau Venus und das schöne Mädchen mit dem Blumenkranze. Zu Eichendorffs ‘Marmorbild’,” 45f. Winfried Woesler argues that one individual could not fulfil the role of Venus. This shows how the women, and Fortunato, and the dark knight Donati, are closer to being a sign than to being a subject. The above semiotic chain could even be extended to include the men. Florio meets Fortunato and falls for Bianka. His encounter with Donati makes him receptive to Venus: Fortunato – pretty girl – Donati – beautiful woman – marble statue. A strictly Deleuzian reading of this semiotic chain would identify the preferred process of becoming: from becoming-woman to becoming-mineral. 104 Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 411. 101

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underneath), he can leave the uncanny place and its semiotic transformations behind. The deep, inscrutable, desirable but dangerous transgressive semiotics is opposed to Fortunato’s songs which are invested with a particular power of goodness because they are ancient and original. Thus, the opposition between the natural sign and the indecipherable sign is also one of good and evil, of Christian and pagan worlds.105 Moby-Dick, Melmoth, and Das Marmorbild all make use of unusual ekphrasis, but there are different kinds of transgressive semiotics involved that have different implications for the interpretation of the novels and the novella. By combining the findings from the previous section on body-signs and ekphrasis in Moby-Dick, it becomes clear that there is a strong desire to engage with liminal semiotics and transgressive signs. Ishmael devotes himself to the deciphering of body-signs as well as to the interpretation of paintings and other icons. Though his semiosis frequently ends in frustration, Ishmael seems to quickly discover a new possible code for the deciphering of the inscrutable. John Melmoth is driven by the same desire and consequently entangles himself in the semiosis of not only the uncanny painting but also of the multiple tales about Melmoth. As we will see later on, he is rewarded in the end. The woman and the statue in Das Marmorbild are engaged in the most radical transformation between subject and sign. The myth becomes statue, and the statue becomes a seductive woman. Florio and the narrator, however, retreat before Florio can pursue the mysteries of the deep any further. The statue’s transformation is explained by a ghost story and could have very well happened in Florio’s imagination. Thus, to a great degree, meaning is established and values are at least partially reaffirmed at the end of Das Marmorbild.

105

This opposition is, however, not absolute in Das Marmobild. Florio has to choose between transgressive or innocent signs, but they are not clear dichotomies. Waltraud Wiethölter is the first to challenge the long established interpretation of the Marmorbild as an allegorical confrontation between the pagan and the Christian world in 1989. Her lucid analysis considers several levels: Romantic discourses on sexuality, iconographic representations of Venus and Mary, and semantic chains within the text. She shows not only how Fortunato’s first encounter with Florio leads to a re-enactment of the Romantic discourse on sexuality, but how every main character is ambivalent and continually changes into his or her opposite. See Waltraud Wiethölter, “Die Schule der Venus. Ein diskursanalytischer Versuch zu Eichendorffs ‘Marmorbild’,” Eichendorffs Modernität, eds. Michael Kessler and Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1989): 171–202. For a more recent interpretation that argues for an inbetween stance instead of stable oppositions in Das Marmorbild and that also makes a case for homosexual desire in the novella see Simon Jan Richter, “Under the Sign of Venus. Eichendorff’s ‘Marmorbild’ and the Erotics of Allegory,” South Atlantic Review 56.2 (1991): 59–71. Dieter Heimböckel also questions the oppositional schema that dominated scholarship on Das Marmorbild for a long time by analyzing the repeated and yet changing motifs. See Dieter Heimböckel, “Ein ‘Meer von Stille’ oder: Von der Ungleichheit des Gleichen. Zum Wiederholungsstil in Joseph Eichendorffs Das Marmorbild,” Aurora. Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 63 (2003): 115–34.

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Transgressive intertexts Moby-Dick: introducing the whale as intertextual fragment Ekphrasis can have different functions in a text which not only depends on how it is used but also on what is described. In all three of the examples discussed above, the object depicted in the painting is already part of a-limitation processes because it is also a text or an intertext of transgression. The whale is transgressive because he is introduced as an “overwhelming idea”, a “mysterious monster”, that incites “an everlasting itch for things remote” and makes Ishmael want to sail “forbidden seas”.106 Ishmael’s mental image of the whale before he sees the painting and before he sees the real whale is already involved in boundary crossing. His conceptual whale swims in a sea that is located epistemologically at the horizon of the knowable, biologically at the border of the abnormal, and morally at the boundary to evil. Thus to Ishmael and his reader, all pictures portraying the whale already have a transgressive connotation which has been established by Ishmael’s introductory reflections on the whale. What is portrayed in the first oil painting of the whale is not only Ishmael’s conceptually transgressive whale but also the semiotically transgressive, intertextual whale. Before Ishmael starts his narrative, he provides the reader with a selection of unordered excerpts about whales that have been supplied to him by a sub-sub-librarian. The selection comprises whale texts taken from major intertextual references ranging from Job and Hamlet to an obscure passage “From ‘Something’ unpublished”.107 The multiple texts engage the whale in unlimited semiosis and thereby in semiotic a-limitation on an intertextual level. The real whale Ishmael tries to describe and understand is premeditated by a semiotic assemblage of seemingly arbitrary texts. As soon as a supposedly coherent mind (the narrator Ishmael) starts thinking about the whale, the whale is already associated with the boundless and the forbidden. To grasp something as semiotically diverse and conceptually elusive as the whale is a daunting task for the narrator. The role intertexts play in semiotic a-limitation depends on their nature (whether the intertext is already involved in boundary phenomena) and their function for the coherence of the text as a whole. In Moby-Dick, the whale is a construct taken from different intertexts. The visual intertext of the dark oil painting attributes not only fantastic qualities but also epistemological difficulties to the whale and is thus crossing boundaries in its properties. Over the course of the novel the micro process of interpreting this intertext through repeated scrutiny and through obtaining interpretations from other characters mirrors the macro process of the whale’s interpretation. In order to describe the whale Ishmael relies on various intertexts, from expedition records to cetological 106 107

Melville, Moby-Dick, 7. Ibid., xix–xxx.

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tracts to literature on the legend of the white whale and multiple other religious, philosophical, and literary texts, but he discards most of them as useless, or he integrates them into an open sign of the whale. The sign of the whale is open because the whale’s mystery instigates the process of unlimited semiosis in which each sign leads to another sign and thus infinitely defers meaning.108 To a certain degree, Ishmael is aware of this as his reflections on the insufficiency of texts to produce a coherent sign of the whale shows. In the notorious chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale”, which is saturated with transgressive intertexts (among them Coleridge’s poem the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that tells of the transgressive killing of an albatross), he confesses that he is overpowered by the horror of the whale and that he fears he might not be able to write about him: “I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form”.109 At the end of the chapter he reflects on the multiplicity of intertexts that apply to the white whale: “And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”110 The number of intertexts renders the whale more valuable and more elusive at the same time. He is so full of meaning that he becomes indefinite. The hunt is thus not only “fiery” in a physical but also in a semiotic sense. An idea that consists of so many intertexts to begin with can incite semiotic conflagration. The intertextual blaze of Moby-Dick is part of its semiotic a-limitation because the intertexts themselves tell of a-limitation, because the intertexts are caught in the semiotic tension between producing meaning and destroying cohesion,111 and finally because this tension is also felt by the narrator himself who fears the multiplicity of the intertexts but seems to have no other choice than to draw on them in order to produce his narrative.112 Thus, I will speak of semiotic a-limitation on the textual level where there are instances of attributed intertextual transgression or functional intertextual transgression, and where either of these is reflected upon. Moby-Dick as the prototype 108

This function is an important Romantic concept that can be identified in other texts as well. For a discussion of Edgar Allen Poe, who is another prime example, see M.J.S. Williams, A World of Words. Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988). 109 Melville, Moby-Dick, 188. 110 Ibid., 195. 111 See Schwab, Entgrenzungen, 87f. 112 Some of the intertexts also create meaning. The Egyptian myths are, for example, a dominant intertext that creates rather than disrupts meaning. For an extensive discussion of Egyptian mythology in Moby-Dick besides Irwin see H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods. Melville’s Mythology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963). Franklin’s reading of the Isis and Osiris myth demonstrates that the privileging of one intertext over others (in this case Hindu myths) can form a valid basis for interpretation (see 73ff.). An interpretation based on the Osiris myth (Osiris chasing Typhon, getting dismembered, and being reborn again) reveals a pattern that applies to Ahab (in addition to Franklin also see Schwab, Entgrenzungen, 81ff.). This pattern coincides with the fluctuations identified in Ishmael’s subjectivity which I will discuss in detail in the section “Schizonarration: Ishmael and the boundaries of narration”.

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of transgressive intertextuality exhibits all three types of transgressive intertextuality while Das Marmorbild and Melmoth the Wanderer make less use of extreme intertextual a-limitation.

Das Marmorbild: Venus as intertext The intertexts in Moby-Dick are not all visual intertexts. In fact, most of them are verbal texts. In Das Marmorbild a verbal intertext is the basis for the uncanny visual text of the marble statue. Sources for Marmorbild are adaptations of the Tannhäuser stories, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and G. Happel’s Grösste Denkwürdigkeiten der Welt oder sogenannte Relationes Curiosae (The greatest memorabilities of the world, or so-called relationes curiosae).113 While Happel certainly provides some of the names, places, and the Gothic story genre, Tieck’s Tannhäuser and Ofterdingen are more interesting in the context of a-limitation. When Florio first sees the marble statue and recognizes in her the original image of the ideal lover, he compares her to a “Wunderblume” (magic flower), which Ofterdingen is famous for. The blue magic flower is used as a label in German Romanticism representing Sehnsucht (yearning or longing), love, and poetry. In Ofterdingen the flower is a woman, a woman who is also a plant. The woman’s subjectivity is erosive due to her proximity to the vegetative world. She is not only a mental construct of the man she is supposed to serve as muse during his process of becoming-poet, but she is also herself in the state of becoming-plant. The magic flower-woman intertext from Ofterdingen thus transports certain traits of a-limitation to Marmorbild. Whoever Florio’s magic flower-woman may be, the reader can expect her subjectivity to be in a fluid state. The semiotic chain developed in the section above, girl – more beautiful girl – woman – marble statue proves this assumption. Only a woman in a state of becoming can also be a plant, or statue or, as is the case at the end of the novella, a boy. The transgressive attributes of the woman as magic flower therefore establish meaning and create coherence. In this sense their function is to delimit rather than to a-limit the story’s realm of becoming. The attributive and the functional roles of the Tannhäuser intertext are similar. Venus was a popular Romantic motif after the adaptation of the Tannhäuser myth in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The boy’s magic bugle). The Tannhäuser-ballad tells the story of the knight Tannhäuser who moves in with Venus and her beautiful playmates on the magic mountain. When he tries to leave, he is seduced to stay until, invoking Mother Mary, he finally departs from the mountain, confesses to the Pope, and asks for absolution. The Pope sets impossible standards for his atonement and Tannhäuser returns to

113

Commentary on Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 758.

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the seductive Venus and the sexual pleasures of the mountain.114 The magic mountain is an outside space, a place where morally unsanctioned actions can take place. It is a space that only has semi-permeable boundaries. Not everyone can find the mountain and it is certainly difficult to withdraw from it. The intertext transports the transgressive morals of Venus to Marmorbild. This Venus also has several other beautiful, sparsely clad women around herself and the seductive power she exercises over Florio is quite strong. Yet, Florio is able to leave her uncanny space, which is a secret garden that is not easy to find, and to free himself from her seductive spell. Thus, the transgressive intertext also functions as a coherent signifier. The reader’s expectation of a dangerously seductive woman is fully met in the shape of the marble Venus.115 If the Tannhäuser intertext establishes meaning, why can Florio leave Venus’s mountain/garden? If Florio were alone in Venus’s space, he would probably stay there forever like Tannhäuser. Florio, however, has someone who can save him by fulfilling the moral of the Tannhäuser story, i.e. that someone who is truly repentant should be forgiven. The singer and poet Fortunato knows about the intertext before Venus even appears. When Florio first meets him outside the gates of Lucca, Fortunato asks him about his business in town. Florio is slightly embarrassed to admit that his travels are motivated by his longing to see the blue mountains because, while still at home, he had heard a gleeman sing of enticing adventures in the distance. Fortunato asks him if he has ever heard of the gleeman who, “durch seine Töne die Jugend in einen Zauberberg hinein verlockt, aus dem Keiner wieder zurückgekehrt ist”.116 (with his music, lures young men into a magic mountain from which no one has ever returned). Florio does not know what to make of Fortunato’s words and does not get a chance to ask him either because they arrive at the festival. Fortunato and the (Romantic) reader are aware of Florio’s potentially dangerous disposition to succumb to enticing music (and women). That is why Fortunato can counter Venus’s uncanny transformations, her music, and her harem with an innocent song and Florio, praying to God, can leave the city freely. At the end of the novella, Florio sings: “Nun bin ich frei! Ich taumle noch / Und kann mich noch nicht fassen – / O Vater du erkennst mich doch, / Und wirst nicht von mir lassen!“117 (Now I am free! I’m still staggering / And cannot get a grip yet – / O father you do recognize me / And you will not abandon me!) Florio is not unaffected by his uncanny encounter, but he has returned to God and, according to the intertext, should therefore be forgiven. Since the intertext completely fulfils the function of establishing coherence, no narrative reflection is necessary. Fortunato’s remarks suffice to establish an intertext 114

See Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 2003) 69–73. 115 On the sexual connotations of the Venus myth in general see Pikulik, “Die Mythisierung des Geschlechtstriebes in Eichendorffs Das Marmorbild.” 116 Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 386. 117 Ibid., 426.

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that serves as a semiotic core for the story and offers a solid basis for interpretation. The only implication that the transgressive magic of the intertext is not completely cancelled by the pious celebration of the breaking day is Florio’s staggering and the fact that the little boy is transformed into his beautiful girl. This time, she looks beautiful to him because the magic mist is gone from his eyes.118 But is it? Or is this transformation the beginning of another semiotic chain: boy – girl – more beautiful girl – …? The Venus myth in the adaptation of Tannhäuser is only one mythical intertext that can be identified in Marmorbild. Despite the other intertexts and the different layers of the Venus myth, however, it establishes rather than defers meaning.119 The genre of Das Marmorbild limits the possibilities that longer narratives such as Moby-Dick or Melmoth have to employ more diverse intertexts.

Moby-Dick: Ahab as assemblage The classical allusions alone used in Moby-Dick are too numerous to list.120 The innumerable identified intertexts of Moby-Dick are one of the reasons why the novel is considered to be Modernist or even Postmodernist. The boundaries of the core text are virtually unidentifiable because of its many intertexts. The patchwork quilt Ishmael describes in the chapter “Counterpane”, the quilt that can hardly be distinguished from Queequeg’s tattooed and sun-tanned skin, could also function as a metaphor for the entire novel. The patchwork quilt is made of many heterogeneous pieces of cloth sewn together to become one blanket that is not at all homogenous, but, as Deleuze and

118

Ibid., 427. There are allusions to Narcissus, Bacchus, the Nymphs, Diana, and Neptune. All these allusions contribute to a solid interpretation. The Venus myth is slightly more complex than portrayed above because it is the adaptation of an adaptation. It is a Greek myth in a medieval version that was popularized again in a Romantic folk song collection. The connotations important for the story, however, are not damaged by the different re-actualizations of the myth. The different intertexts harmonize with each other, as well, because they all belong to the same semantic field of the Greek pagan world that is conflated with the uncanny space of Gothic fiction. A few allusions to the Bible and numerous references or similarities to other texts by Eichendorff and the sources named above complement the manageable intertextual world of the short novella. Venus is a mythical palimpsest – a trait that contributes to her elusiveness and her mysteriousness. For a detailed analysis based on the Narcissus and the Venus myths see Manfred Beller, “Narziß und Venus. Klassische und romantische Allegorie in Eichendorffs Novelle Das Marmorbild,” Euphorion. Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 62 (1968): 117–38. Beller shows that the Venus myth is merged with Ovid’s Narcissus. This myth provides a significant basis for the interpretation of the doubles and doppelganger in the novella. He also connects Eichendorff’s Venus to other Venuses (Botticelli’s painting). 120 An overview is provided in Gail H Coffler, Melville’s Classical Allusions. A Comprehensive Index and Glossary (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1985).

119

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Guattari call it, “amorphous”.121 It can be infinitely expanded. It is made of left-over fabric, or textual fragments from our cultural history. Queequeg himself resembles such a textual (or textile) space, but other characters in the novel are also patchwork-subjects. Ahab, who resembles a biblical king, King Lear, Macbeth, Prometheus, Faust, and the devil is enthroned above all of them.122 When Ahab muses about whether he is controlled by God or fate, or whether man is himself in control of his life, he asks, “Is Ahab, Ahab?”123 This question could be answered with a careful ‘virtually’ on a metatextual level. To a certain extent, Ahab is Ahab, but Ahab is only a name for an assemblage of texts and topoi that assume a textual corporeal appearance for the duration of the novel. His artificial limb represents the physical counterpart of a subject as assemblage, or one in a state of becoming. Ahab is a patchwork quilt of texts, a smooth space that offers a multiplicity of interpretative possibilities. In the end, this smooth quality, this mode of becoming, makes him as inscrutable as the object he seeks. Ahab’s intertextuality therefore becomes one more reason for the “fiery hunt”. To define himself, Ahab must completely give up his self and acknowledge his own limitlessness. He longs to do so in several passages of the novel. His desire for dissolution is expressed in the wish to turn into one of the elements: “I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. […] By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.”124 Ahab wants to be air and fire (in another passage he wants to burn with the corposants) and relinquish his marred body. He also exhibits traces of becoming-sea.125 It seems as if Ahab the character is aware of his fragile semiotic subjectivity. He may behave like God, an omnipotent dictator, but at the same time he desires to explore his fragmented side, to dissolve and consciously become what he already is semiotically: an intertext.126 121

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 526. On Shakespearean allusions and Melville’s study of Shakespeare see Charles Olson, Call me Ishmael (New York: Grove Press, 1947). On the Faust myth see Gustaaf van Cromphout, “MobyDick. The Transformation of the Faustian Ethos,” American Literature. A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 51.1 (1979): 17–32. 123 Melville, Moby-Dick, 545. 124 Ibid., 472. 125 Gabriele Schwab, who discusses Moby-Dick as an early example of pre-Modernist Entgrenzung, argues that Ahab cannot distinguish the boundaries of his self. He only sees himself in the coin; he is becoming-whale; he perceives the other crew members as parts of his body. Schwab’s psychoanalytical interpretation focuses on the processes of doubling the self (Ahab-whale, AhabPip, Ahab-Fedallah). See Schwab, Entgrenzungen, 76–92. 126 Moby-Dick is an intertext as well. The whale is described with the help of many sources. An analysis of the myths employed reveals a wild myth-making that, for instance, draws on various religions to explore Moby Dick’s divinity. Franklin, The Wake of God, 53–98. In our context, this means that Ahab as an open intertext is connected to Moby Dick through several semantic/mythical lines. His becoming-whale is made possible by the open nature of Ahab and the whale that offers points for possible connections. 122

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Both Moby-Dick and Das Marmorbild make use of intertexts and intermediality in the shape of ekphrasis. While the ekphrasis in Das Marmorbild is more radical in crossing the boundaries between subject and sign than the description of the painting in Moby-Dick is, other passages in the novel discussed in the first section of this chapter (“Moby-Dick: signs on whales and men”) also dissolve this boundary. The radical alimitation of sign and subject through the transgression of the sign-object boundary and the employment of a transgressive intertext does not reach the climax of the hero’s dissolution in Das Marmorbild. Florio escapes his own becoming-sign, or becomingmyth, by refusing to follow transgressive Venus into her space. Ahab, on the contrary, hunts Moby-Dick, the object of his desire, until the very end, until he merges with him. Das Marmorbild and Moby-Dick are therefore two poles on a scale of a-limitation. In Das Marmorbild a-limitation is just a temporal experience that is not carried through on a semiotic level. In Moby-Dick not only the crossing but the dissolution of boundaries is achieved in all three dimensions.

Melmoth: Gothic intertexts and the devil Melmoth the Wanderer could be situated in between the two previous texts. The novel is saturated with allusions, direct quotations, and the evocation of different intertexts. Maturin employs many well- and less well-known texts. His main sources are the Bible, Shakespeare, and contemporary Romantic or Gothic literature. The references are sometimes integrated into the text and at other times are explicitly quoted as in the passage in which John first discovers the portrait. He is horrified by the eyes and wishes that he had never seen them, knowing that he will never be able to forget them. The narrator explains: “Had [John] been acquainted with the poetry of Southey, he might have often exclaimed in his after-life ‘Only the eyes had life, / They gleamed with demon light.’ – THALABA.”127 The cited passage is from Robert Southey’s epic poem “Thalaba the Destroyer” which tells of a long journey of revenge against evil sorcerers. Some of the poem’s Gothic themes can also be found in Melmoth, but the main function of this intertext is to explain to the reader John’s feeling of horror. In Southey’s poem the gleaming eyes belong to the head torn from an infant just after birth and put on a golden plate to serve the evil sorcerer as an oracle.128 Of course, this intertext is full of moral transgressions. Due to its moralistic conclusion and the narrative structure, however, it is a rather conventional Gothic epic poem. The method of using a slightly transgressive intertext to construct meaning is similar to that deployed in Das Marmorbild. Instead of describing John’s immediate experience, the narrator relies on another text, one that John does not even know, to convey the horror of the portrait’s eyes. As in

127 128

Maturin, Melmoth, 18. See Robert Southey, Thabala the Destroyer (New York: Routledge, 1860) 22.

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Moby-Dick, intertexts in Melmoth are used to describe something that is difficult or virtually impossible to convey. The intertext plays an important role in the attempt to produce subjects and narratives. Before the first encounter with the mysterious Melmoth from the portrait, the reader already knows that he must be a demon or perhaps some kind of evil sorcerer because his eyes are described with the help of the Gothic intertext. Melmoth himself briefly appears as a person, but he primarily remains a textual construct – a sign whose signified is a terrible secret that John, Stanton (the manuscript’s narrator), and others (including the reader) are eager to discover. Melmoth is the textual construct of many embedded narratives but also that of intertexts not explicitly named or alluded to. As a late Gothic work, Melmoth stands in the tradition of works about Faustian or Promethean transgressors who, through knowledge, attempt to position themselves on a level with God, or even higher. The character Melmoth is in part based on these intertexts. He has apparently committed the sin of wanting to know too much and has sold his soul to achieve this. In one of the complicated embedded stories an old clergyman recalls Melmoth’s own recognition of the moment he became a Faustian figure:129 “It was the first mortal sin – a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge!”130 In other words, Melmoth crossed the boundary between man and God by attaining knowledge reserved for the divine. After this breaking and entering, the next step is to sell his soul to the devil. Once his soul is lost, Melmoth realizes his grave error and starts looking for another soul to replace his lost one. Consequently, he turns into a deformed Mephisto or a version of the Eternal Jew.131 His wanderings are the attempt to change places with a human being desperate enough to trade his or her soul for Melmoth’s powers. Shortly before his death Melmoth warns John and Monçada, another major character in the novel, “remember your lives will be the forfeit of your desperate curiosity. For the same stake I risked more than life – and lost it! – Be warned – Retire!”132 Other Faustian figures such as Frankenstein warn posterity with similar words: “Farewell Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”133 And even the great Faustian Ahab has his weak moments

129

On parallels to different Faust stories see: John Stott, “The Structure of Melmoth the Wanderer,” Etudes Irlandaise 12.1 (1987): 47f. 130 Maturin, Melmoth, 499. 131 See Chris Baldick, “Introduction,” Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) xvi. 132 Maturin, Melmoth, 540f. 133 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1999) 166.

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when he thinks about his ambition to catch the white whale: “Why this strife of the chase?”134 he asks Starbuck, and yet, he continues it to the end. Like Ahab, Melmoth is not only a Faustian and a Promethean figure, but he also exhibits some traits of the devil himself. Ahab’s glaring eyes,135 his familiarity with fire and his demonic power over the crew demonstrate his devilish tendencies. Melmoth is a tempter and a supernatural figure that most of the other characters in the novel immediately identify as the devil or a demon. He is “independent of time and place”136 and appears wherever an unfortunate person faces any temptation. Melmoth also understands his role as the embodiment of evil that cannot exist without the evil nature of man: “[W]retches! your vices, your passions, and your weaknesses, make you my victims”.137 Melmoth’s main transgression was to strive for divine knowledge. His other sins are merely minor trespasses: the curses, the blasphemy, the tempting, and the destruction of lives are consequences of the one Faustian sin. Melmoth is certainly the villain of the novel, but he also shares some traits with the victims. Melmoth’s soft side is most evident in his dealings with Isidora/Immalee. Tempting her makes him suffer. When Isidora prays, he has to turn away in agony because he cannot participate.138 Melmoth is the victim of his own pact with the devil – a sad substitute devil who has to shoulder a heavy burden and who strives to finally find relief (even if it be in death). The gleaming eyes of his portrait, which were the first indication of a semiotic transgression, lose their liveliness at the end. At the end of the novel, immediately preceding Melmoth’s death, his eyes are dead (while the portrait’s eyes are alive). Melmoth becomes what he has been all along: a dead sign rather than a person. His dream at the end of the novel is his only unmediated action as a subject that is directly narrated by the frame narrator and focalized through Melmoth himself. He dreams about his annihilation in an ocean of fire, about his fall into hell. As a Faustian figure, he is summoned by the devil, and as the wanderer he led a devilish life tempting people to sell their souls. The morning after his dream, John and Monçada discover nothing but a trace leading to the cliffs over the ocean and a handkerchief worn by Melmoth. As an intertext, Melmoth is certainly more complicated than Venus because he merges Faustian and devilish attributes (one could even add the Eternal Jew to the assemblage), but he is not as indistinct as Ahab, who assumes many more roles. The intertexts he mainly relies on are well known within the genre and help the reader to make sense of the many embedded narratives he or she is presented with. The narrator(s) therefore makes frequent use of transgressive intertexts (for example Southey’s poem or the Faust myth) in order to describe the indescribable and so create a coherent narrative.

134

Melville, Moby-Dick, 544. See ibid., 202. 136 Maturin, Melmoth, 44. 137 Ibid., 522. 138 See ibid., 365. 135

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The contrastive analysis of Moby-Dick, Das Marmorbild, and Melmoth shows that intertextuality can have different functions regarding semiotic a-limitation. The functionality of an intertext is caught up in the same semiotic tension that Romantic texts in general often exhibit: absolute meaning and arbitrary language games. In Das Marmorbild, a specific intertext (Tannhäuser) can be identified as the basis for the uncanny marble statue of Venus. This intertext has transgressive attributes (space outside of society, behaviour outside of social norms), but it is mainly used as a stable motif for the plot of the novella. The in-depth exploration of the intertext is dangerous for the protagonist because getting lost in transgressive and mythical intertexts would challenge his subjectivity. In the same way, the intertext functions as a stabilizing element for the interpretation of the novella. The intertexts in Melmoth have a similar function, but the threats of language games and the deferral of meaning are much higher. The frequent employment of allusions, quotes, and intertextual concepts virtually battles the difficulties of narrating an unbelievable and indescribable story. As the section on “Uncanny Ekphrasis” demonstrates, coherence and cohesion are narrative problems in Melmoth. The first longer account of Melmoth the Wanderer that John (and the reader) receives is provided through a mutilated manuscript in which the crucial passages seem to be missing. In the subsequent narratives, similar difficulties occur because the narrators often seem unable to repeat Melmoth’s words and temptations or speak about their sufferings. After the destruction of the portrait, John almost drowns in the sea during a storm but is rescued by a ship-wrecked Spaniard who provides the frame narrative for the main part of the novel. Monçada, the Spaniard, however, can hardly begin to tell his story: “He began – hesitated – stopped; tried in vain to arrange his ideas, or rather his language…”.139 Allusions to familiar intertexts help to counter these difficulties, but they also open interpretative possibilities. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael suffers similar difficulties in fulfilling his task of representation. The transgressive intertexts he uses to counter the deficiencies of language do not suffice to create meaning. Ishmael himself often seems to despair at the attempt to create coherence because accumulation of intertexts runs contrary to its desired effect. The great Ahab is no longer a literary subject, but an assemblage of texts. No matter how hard Ishmael tries, his narration inevitably also loses its boundaries and Ishmael is sucked into the maelstrom of becoming.

Schizonarration: Ishmael and the boundaries of narration An intertext can either establish meaning and thereby function as a great mythical and transcendent signifier, or it can contribute to a multiplicity of meanings. To a certain degree, the role intertexts play in the process of semiotic a-limitation depends on the 139

Ibid., 72.

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narrator and his or her ability to control the text and the desire to lose him or herself in the text. This narratological tension is best illustrated in Moby-Dick, a novel with an unusual first person narrator, who begins the story as autodiegetic narrator recounting his own adventures at sea, and an independent central protagonist, the monomaniac Ahab. Ishmael as narrator and as subject can be traced through his appearances as a protagonist, through his commentaries and reflections, but also through changes in focalization. Although his presence is strongest at the beginning, he does not disappear over the course of the novel, but rather resurfaces again and again as if he were also swimming in an ocean and at times the waves were blocking the reader’s view of his head in the infinite sea. Ishmael is in control of his narrative because he knows its outcome, he knows the line of flight Ahab will go down, he can trace the Pequod’s journey on a chart and knows where its journey is headed. Prime evidence for this basic control over the story is provided by Ishmael’s use of prolepsis. After having become friends, Queequeg and Ishmael decide to ship together. Queequeg demonstrates his multiple skills and his good character by rescuing a drowning man who had previously insulted him. Impressed by this gallantry, Ishmael feels even more affectionate towards his new friend: “From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.”140 In this prolepsis Ishmael reveals that their common journey will end with Queequeg’s death, which, if the utterance is not taken purely metaphorically, will be by water. Indeed, the Pequod sinks and leaves only one survivor to tell its story. As a controlling narrator, Ishmael decides whose words are related and which events are worth telling, but he is also drawn into the powerful story. What could be called narrative flexibility is also the reason for Ishmael’s fuzzy subject boundaries and his frequent disappearance as protagonist in his own story. Ishmael demonstrates narrative flexibility by attempting to reproduce dialects and idiolects. The first people he encounters when signing up for the Pequod are her owners, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad, who are both Quakers and are characterized by their particular dialect: “the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom”.141 The protagonist Ishmael immediately adopts the Quakers’ dialect: “‘He says he’s our man, Bildad,’ said Peleg, ‘he wants to ship.’ ‘Dost thee?’ said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me. ‘I dost,’ said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.”142 Ishmael is overwhelmed by the (linguistic) power of the other person and performs a code switch assimilating the Quaker variety. Not only the experiencing ‘I’, the protagonist Ishmael, but also the narrator adopts this dramatic style on many occasions when he speaks with pathos. Praising the art of whaling, he exclaims: “Think of that, ye loyal Britons!”143 When he celebrates his shipmate Bulkington as the epitome of a whaleman, he exclaims: “Take 140

Melville, Moby-Dick, 61. Ibid., 73. 142 Ibid., 75. 143 Ibid., 114.

141

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heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod!”144 As a narrator he often makes use of the dramatic style, which is also Ahab’s Shakespearean idiolect. Another example of this communicative assimilation is the introduction of the first mate Starbuck. Starbuck is the careful, brave, and pious mate, who tries to dissuade Ahab from his mad chase, who objects to Ahab’s blasphemy, and who sees the holy trinity in the golden coin that tells a different story to each spectator. Following a brief description of the character Starbuck, Ishmael sermonizes about the “great God absolute”145 and his democratic omnipresence. The uprightness of Starbuck exerts as strong an influence on Ishmael as the Quakers’ dialect does. Instead of controlling the story, Ishmael is affected by the story. The question as to whether Ishmael controls the story or is controlled by the story is difficult to answer. Because of his communicative flexibility, he seems to be overwhelmed by the force of the story and its protagonists. He is also an auto- or homodiegetic narrator and, by definition, does not have full control of his story. Due to his limited perspective, he should not have access to other people’s minds or to spaces where he would not be allowed to be. His numerous careful phrases, such as the repetition of the phrase “seem”, remind the reader of Ishmael’s limitations. When introducing Starbuck Ishmael comments, “He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine”, 146 and about Stubb he remarks, “[w]hat he thought of death itself, there is no telling.”147 He can merely speculate about the highly praised Bulkington, and regarding Ahab he admits his limited insight. Immediately after the notorious passage where Ahab piles all human rage on the whale’s back, Ishmael mentions his own constraints: “This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.”148 Ahab poses the same problems to Ishmael as Moby Dick does. Just as the whale does not speak about his mysteries and gives Ishmael only an indecipherable skin to decode, Ahab’s profundity can only be explored on the surface. The other crew members’ hatred for the white whale and their unquestioned support of Ahab are no easier to explain. Ishmael surrenders, “all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go”.149 These self-reflexive comments on narrative boundaries mark Ishmael as a literary subject who has only limited insight based on the natural devices available to subjects for their assessment of other subjects. He can make statements based on information, deduction, and speculation, but he cannot read other subjects’ minds. These constraints constitute Ishmael the protagonist and narrator as subject.

144

Ibid., 107. Ibid., 117. 146 Ibid., 115. 147 Ibid., 118. 148 Ibid., 185. 149 Ibid., 187. 145

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Yet, Ishmael breaks the constraints of a first-person narrator throughout the novel and thereby also crosses the boundaries of a normal literary subject. Ahab, who is such a mystery, whose bodily presence remains inaccessible for such a long time before he finally shows himself on deck, and who seems too profound to be fully understood, can be accessed by Ishmael. He can report on the events and the atmosphere at the cabin table at which he would never have been allowed to sit. While the first insights into Ahab’s mind are reported through dramatic soliloquies that Ishmael may have witnessed, the focalization gradually changes to encompass more than the limitations of an autodiegetic narrator would allow for. The chapters “Sunset”, “Dusk”, “First Night-Watch”, and “Midnight, Forecastle” are soliloquies and dialogues of various crew members. Starting with Ahab alone in his cabin, the mates and the crew reflect and discuss their situation. These passages are clearly a change of genre. The minimal narrative mediation takes the form of stage directions. The narrator Ishmael and the protagonist Ishmael have disappeared into the text. In other passages Ishmael reports Ahab’s or Starbuck’s thoughts in interior monologue or psycho narration. Because of these insights, the reader is, for instance, able to witness Starbuck’s inner struggle whether or not to kill Ahab and so finish the mad and unprofitable chase of one whale. Starbuck goes down to Ahab’s cabin, “however reluctantly and gloomily,”150 to give a report, but “involuntarily paused before it a moment”.151 When he sees the muskets in the rack “there strangely evolved an evil thought”152 in the upright mate. Starbuck’s monologue, which documents his inner debate whether to shoot Ahab or not, is reported as a murmur. Thoughts and private words mingle. The subject Ishmael is not there to witness them, but the narrator reports them to us. Instead of seeing this crossing of narrative and subject boundaries as a split between the narrating and the experiencing ‘I’ and thus diagnosing Ishmael with schizophrenia, torn between story and discourse,153 I would like to argue that the flexibility and the protagonist Ishmael’s desire to merge with others effects a versatility and mobility in the narrative process. As a subject and protagonist he expresses this desire for subject alimitation quite clearly. The scene with Queequeg and his uncanny embrace illustrates Ishmael’s desire to be close to others, to be a part of another being (see the section on “Moby-Dick: signs on men and whales”). Another prime example of Ishmael’s desire for subject a-limitation as the dissolution of boundaries is the passage on squeezing sperm. When the cetaceum, spermaceti, or sperm is extracted from the whale it crystallizes. By squeezing the lumps, it can be returned to its fluid state: I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, 150

Ibid., 514. Ibid., 514. 152 Ibid., 514. 153 Cf. Schwab, Entgrenzungen, 70. 151

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mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. […] Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.154

Ishmael uses the medium of spermaceti to change his state from a solid self to a subject in flux that connects with other subjects. He is on his way to becoming a body without organs. His process of losing the self is one of positive schizophrenia. Not only contact with people, but (as in Ahab’s case) contact with the elements initiates similar processes of subject a-limitation. In two instances Ishmael is on the verge of transcendence or dissolution but averts the process because of its hazards. On the watch, sailors stand on the mast-head, “lost in the infinite series of the sea” with the ship rolling meditatively below.155 If a sailor is a “romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded” young man like Childe Harold, he will hardly spot a whale.156 Whether there are whales or not does not matter, but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absentminded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible [sic] form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.157

Ocean (i.e. space) and mind merge, subject and animal merge and cause the loss of identity, of subjectivity, in favour of gaining greater insight through becoming-sea. Ishmael describes a prototypical Romantic experience of transcendence,158 but he also draws attention to the occupational hazards of Romantic subjects involved in the process of becoming: “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.”159 If the Romantic subject falls off the masthead, the subject a-limitation is carried to the extreme of death. The combination of fire and night has the same dangerous effect on the romantically disposed Ishmael. Ishmael is at the helm of the ship during the night and, looking at the burning try-works where the whale is being turned into oil, he loses consciousness for a moment. In this interval of dreaming, he turns around so that he faces darkness and the compass is at his back. Ishmael almost loses control of himself and the ship. Without the compass he nearly steers the Pequod into the wind. The controlled, striated space of 154

Melville, Moby-Dick, 416. Ibid., 156. 156 Ibid., 158. 157 Ibid., 159. 158 Leon Chai compares the passage to the notion of the Aeolian harp in Coleridge and Shelley. He also reads the later shift from third to second person as the dissolution of subject and object boundaries, but does not pursue the narratological aspect any further. See Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) 314–20. 159 Melville, Moby-Dick, 159. 155

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the compass is a stronghold for Ishmael. By destroying the quadrant and relying only on his own methods of tracking, Ahab turns the sea back into smooth space.160 Ishmael, however warns the reader: “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.”161 As Deleuze and Guattari advise, Ishmael does not revert to extreme measures to make himself a body without organs. He does not pursue subject a-limitation to the extreme of death.162 Ishmael desires the dissolution of his subject boundaries, but the resulting a-limitation is a process of transgression of boundaries that is followed by the renewal of these boundaries. In Ishmael’s movements as protagonist and as narrator, as well as in his description of subject a-limitation, a pattern of de- and reterritorialization emerges that is characterized by the departure of the protagonist in favor of the narrator, his resurfacing as a subject of the text, and his immediate desire for dissolution. The examples discussed above (spermaceti, masthead, try-works) fall into a broad pattern. In “The Mast-Head” chapter Ishmael begins his narration as a strong subject. He tells of his first time on the masthead. The central point of the chapter is to describe the experience of subject a-limitation encountered when standing up on the look-out. 160

See Lorraine, “Ahab and Becoming-Whale,” 168. Cf. Eric Wilson, Romantic Turbulence. Chaos, Ecology, and American Space (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 71–93. Wilson differentiates between Ahab as pilgrim and Ishmael as nomad. This opposition is problematic because Ahab’s charts are monomaniac indices of his becoming-whale and the destruction of the quadrant makes him nomadic as well. Wilson’s interpretation of Moby-Dick focuses on the spatial aspect of Ishmael as nomad. I agree with some of the major assumptions (ocean equals whale, Ishmael represents a nomadic way of thinking that is focused on the ungraspable and pursues a circular motion, Ahab’s assumed superiority in the chain of beings versus Ishmael’s more ecological view and his affinity towards a savage/nomadic way of life, Ishmael’s predisposition to merge with others), but not with the idea that Ahab is on a linear quest. My semiotic reading comes to the conclusion that Ahab, too, is on a line of flight that carries him beyond the limit. Wilson draws on similar passages to prove his point, but does not explore their semiotic, poetological, or narratological sides. Nor does Wilson consider the function of Ahab’s madness in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where Ahab is explicitly mentioned. 161 Melville, Moby-Dick, 425. 162 The self-destructions in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the body without organs have nothing to do with death. “Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measures with the craft of a surveyor.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 177. Death and destruction are an end-point from which the bwo (body without organs) cannot return. A-limitation, however, is a process that is open and potentially unlimited. The body without organs is not a body without organs but without strict organization. In the moments described above, Ishmael relaxes the order of his subjectivity and of his body by endangering the body to a certain point. Deleuze and Guattari use masochism and pain as exemplary ways to do this, but also make clear that becoming a bwo is different for everyone. Masochism is not something you should try at home: “That there are other ways, other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.” (172) Ishmael’s own procedure is suitable for him because it keeps him in a process of becoming rather than killing him.

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The next chapter describes a scene on the deck which involves many crew members. The subject Ishmael has disappeared after the experience of subject a-limitation on the masthead and the narrator’s presence is not strong either. In the chapters “Sunset”, “Dusk”, “First Night-Watch”, and “Midnight, Forecastle” Ishmael completely disappears into the text by reducing narrative mediation to an absolute minimum. As the passages on the try-works and the masthead show, however, Ishmael is careful not to lose himself completely. He reinscribes himself into the text in the next chapter (“Moby Dick”) by starting it with a strong personal pronoun: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew”.163 His linguistic and his personal presence undergo the same process of subject a-limitation as they did in the previously described chapters. Inherent in his materialization as a subject is his immediate deterritorialization. Ishmael is not just “I, Ishmael”, but he is also part of the crew as he explains, “my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs”.164 The ‘I’ is immediately enlarged to become a collective. Ishmael merges with the crew, and with Ahab: “Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”165 As described above, this dissolution of subject boundaries is not complete. There are hidden depths to Ahab and the crew that Ishmael cannot explore. Along this trajectory, a continuing pattern of subjectivity, dissolution, reassertion, dissolution, and reassertion until Ishmael’s last literary resurfacing at the end of the novel can be identified. This alternation between the linguistic manifestation of the subject Ishmael and his desire to dissolve his boundaries that results in his linguistic dissolution characterizes the pattern of a-limitation. The semiotic movement of Ishmael, his schizonarration, is also an expression of the semiotic tension. His oscillation between the limited perspective of a narrator who is controlled by the story (i.e. the power of language) and the perspective of the authorial narrator who has insight into the minds of his protagonists and is in control of the transcendent signified situates Moby-Dick in the liminal space of Romantic semiotics.

The retreat of the signified: embedded narratives Moby-Dick: the Town-Ho-story as problem of narration Most Romantic texts can be located somewhere in the liminal space between Adamic language/transcendent signifieds and the deferral of meaning and language games. There are, however, distinct inclinations towards one or the other that determine the degree of semiotic a-limitation. So far, I have considered how ekphrasis and intertextu163

Melville, Moby-Dick, 179. Ibid., 179. 165 Ibid., 179. 164

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ality can be employed to strengthen either side of Romantic semiotics. Ishmael’s schizonarration is an example of a strong fluctuation between the desire for interpretation and representation and the desire for dissolution.166 The control a narrator has over a story situates him in the semiotic space. This positioning of the narrator is often exemplified by intradiegetic narrators and their embedded stories that facilitate the possibility of narrative self-reflection. This section explores the role embedded narratives play in alimitation by beginning briefly with Moby-Dick and then discussing Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in detail. In Moby-Dick, the encounter with other whaling ships offers the opportunity to tell stories within the story.167 The longest embedded tale is about the ship Town-Ho. Ishmael recounts the story of the Town-Ho which was kept secret on the ship itself. Only three men on board knew of it and “communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy”,168 but Tashtego speaks of it in his sleep and has to reveal the rest when he is woken. Ishmael decides to include the story in his narration: “Interweaving in its proper place the darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of the strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.”169 Thus, Ishmael tells a story that has undergone several mediations before it reaches the reader. Anyone who has ever played telephone game can imagine that Ishmael’s version is not the original one. The original version is related as a secret to one of the harpooners, who divulges it mostly in his sleep and provides the missing parts only once awake. Ishmael then combines this story with other pieces of information to construct a presentable version. This version is not told directly but is framed as a retelling of an earlier relation of the story: “For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the

166

Rowland A. Sherrill identifies a similar tension in Ishmael between the limits of metaphysical epistemology and the discovery of a hidden God. The transcendent experiences Rowland identifies overlap partially with the key passages quoted in the previous section. He also discusses the spirit spout and the whale school as transcendent moments. Ishmael cannot lose himself completely in these moments because his thought processes and his ability to understand symbols would be impaired. The whale is the ultimate wonder world for which the other experiences prepare him. The encounters with the whale are revelatory, but also conceal the truth. The reason for the epistemological dilemma of the hidden transcendence of the whale lies in his divinity. Ishmael cannot experience this fully, but only in the spiritually endowed everyday life. See Rowland A. Sherrill, The Prophetic Melville. Experience, Transcendence, and Tragedy (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1979) 133–66. 167 Embedded narratives are always, to a certain degree, self-reflexive and thus point to the artificial construction of the narrative world. Self-reflexivity will be mentioned throughout the chapter as it is also a trait of a-limitation situated at the pole of the deferral of meaning, but it does not comprise a major focus of this work. On self-reflexivity in Moby-Dick see Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 81–114. For the Town-Ho story: 110–113. 168 Melville, Moby-Dick, 242. 169 Ibid., 243.

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thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.”170 The original story is thrice removed from the reader, its core is hidden underneath several layers of (textual) mediation. The embedded story is not only told in the Golden Inn version for humor’s sake. Ishmael uses the storytelling frame of the actual story as a means of authentification. His Spanish audience represents the implied reader, who is not an expert on whaling, and so helps Ishmael anticipate and answer potential questions and interjections. The Dons ask questions about places and professions that Ishmael readily answers. When he reaches the climax of the story, telling of a mutiny on board the Town-Ho, Moby Dick makes his appearance. The Spanish friends are excited about the strange whale and request more details. “‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’”171 Ishmael answers briefly, “‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don; – but that would be too long a story.’”172 This piece of information only incites the curiosity of the audience: “‘How? How?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.”173 Ishmael remains firm and refuses a longer explanation: “‘Nay, Dons, Dons – nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.’”174 The curiosity and the desire to know about the secret whale suffocate Ishmael. The frame of the story illustrates his difficulties of explaining, defining, and narrating the white whale. The intradiegetic narrator Ishmael in Lima faces the same problems encountered by the extradiegetic narrator who tells his story to us. To talk about the white whale in a way that satisfies his audience seems as impossible in the intradiegetic story as it does in the novel itself. The following chapters on pictures of whales support this claim. In the course of the novel, Ishmael frequently seems frustrated by or apologetic of his inability to represent the whale. His comments on the difficulties of narration result from his vision of an implied reader who is as unsatisfied and curious as his Spanish friends were. Having finished the Town-Ho story, Ishmael is immediately questioned by his Spanish friend: “‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.’”175 Ishmael is ready to swear on the Bible; a priest and the book are fetched and he vows that “in substance and its great items” the story is true.176 The intradiegetic narrator’s oath in the frame of the embedded story could be understood as a reflection of the process of narration. With this oath, Ishmael also swears that everything he tells us is true “in substance and its great items”. 170

Ibid., 243. Ibid., 256. 172 Ibid., 256. 173 Ibid., 256. 174 Ibid., 256. 175 Ibid., 258. 176 Ibid., 259. 171

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While the frame of the embedded story is used to increase its credibility and the frame of the frame (the encounter with the Town-Ho and Tashtego’s accidental revelation of the story) is used to create authenticity, the very same mechanisms also have a counter-effect. A story told in secret, revealed through sleepy mumblings, and supplemented with other information can no longer be authentic– particularly if the narrator is retelling an older version of the story. Information is bound to get lost in the process. Ishmael is aware of this and therefore only swears on the truth of the “substance and its great items” of the story. Yet the important role Moby Dick plays in the story (a sort of supernatural avenger) remains blurry and unexplained. Ishmael refuses to say more about the whale. The greatest item of the story remains in the dark. The embedded story thus reflects Ishmael as a narrator who is trying hard to tell a story, but in the end has to admit his own unreliability or even inability to do so. On the surface, the embedded story seems to enforce one side of Romantic semiotics, but it actually demonstrates the ineptness of the subject to control the sign and therefore slips into the liminal space of boundary semiotics.

Melmoth: searching for the devil In Moby-Dick, the difficulties of narration and representation are both explicit (as, for example, in Ishmael’s comments on pictures of whales) and implicit (the embedded tale and the narrator’s unreliability). The narrator of the frame tale in Melmoth is aware of the difficulties that many intradiegetic narrators have with the story of horrible encounters with Melmoth. When Monçada first begins to tell his story, the narrator turns to the reader: “[I]n mercy to the reader, we shall give [the narrative] without the endless interruptions, and queries, and anticipations of curiosity, and starts of terror, with which it was broken by Melmoth”.177 As in the Town-Ho story, the narrator does not completely dispense with audience interruptions. There are a few interruptions of Monçada’s tale that remind the reader of the frame and provide an implied reader for the entangled tales. The narrative structure keeps skipping back and forth between the time of young Melmoth in nineteenth-century England and stories of Melmoth the Wanderer in earlier centuries and different locations (Spain, England, an island), and thereby mirrors Melmoth’s existence that is outside of time and space, and is a secret. The narrative structure in Melmoth is also the structure of Melmoth the Wanderer. The reader is forced to continuously cross narrative boundaries and this coincides with Melmoth’s spatio-temporal178 and moral transgressions. The continued deferral of the text’s major signified (Melmoth) coincides with the unspeakable secret that defines his existence. 177 178

Maturin, Melmoth, 73. Jack Null reconstructs Melmoth’s wanderings and gives a detailed timeline. See Jack Null, “Structure and Theme in Melmoth the Wanderer,” Papers on Language and Literature 13.2 (1977):133– 147.

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Melmoth is a being outside of time: he does not age for 150 years. He exists in the stories as well as in the frame narrative. Boundaries mean nothing to him: no door can keep him from entering a cell in the prison of the Inquisition, and the ocean does not prevent him from stepping on an island in the East Indies. His space is that of the Gothic novel: monasteries, old mansions, dungeons, subterranean passages. They are isolated, hermetic, dark, damp, and usually imprison the protagonists in some way or another. Melmoth can enter them easily, or he can wait for the victim of his temptations to be imprisoned in these spaces.179 Melmoth’s spatial independence is emphasized by the frequent mentioning of borders, boundaries, and thresholds that are crossed by either protagonists or by Melmoth himself. John Melmoth literally enters the story through the gate of his uncle’s house. The melancholy house determines the tenor of all successive stories. It is a ruin with an unkept lawn without hedges or fences. John is immediately affected by the sinister scenery: “[A]fter a melancholy gaze”180 he has to force himself to knock on the door and enter into the threatening space. Like the House of Usher that mirrors the disintegrations of its inhabitants and their family, the uncle’s house also shows “signs of increasing desolation”.181 Thus it functions as a sign of its master’s slow death. John crosses the physical boundary (door) into the story and takes the reader with him. His uncle’s house is the first Gothic space (like a Gothic base camp), and serves as a frame for various stories about Melmoth. The second crossing into a particularly atmospheric space, deeper into the dark secrets of his family history, takes place when John enters the forbidden closet where the manuscript of Melmoth’s wanderings and his portrait are hidden. Again, the narrator marks this transgression by relating John’s anxiety about the closet: “The remainder of the day was passed in gloomy and anxious deliberation, – in traversing his late uncle’s room,– approaching the door of the closet, and then retreating from it”.182 Finally, he “resolutely enter[s] the closet”.183 By entering the closet, John becomes a hero of the Gothic space and also triggers other embedded stories (the manuscript). The crossing of physical boundaries thus roughly coincides with the crossing of narrative boundaries. While houses and closets are conventional spatial borders, especially for the Gothic novel, the embedded stories work with the crossing of other boundaries, too. In “The Tale of Guzman’s Family” it is the crossing of the Spanish border that leaves a Protestant family at the mercy of the cruel Church, and in the “Indian Tale” an island is 179

Trautwein identifies two variants of movement in Gothic spaces: either a protagonist enters a threatening space or his/her safe space is entered by a threat. Melmoth’s independence of space links the stories that make use of both devices. See Wolfgang Trautwein, Erlesene Angst. Schauerliteratur im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (München and Wien: Hanser, 1980) 86–94 and 144. 180 Maturin, Melmoth, 9. 181 Ibid., 9. 182 Ibid., 22. 183 Ibid., 27.

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invaded by Melmoth. In this case, terror enters paradise, but space is often significant even before Melmoth enters into it (as in the “Guzman’s Tale” or the “Spaniard’s Tale”). Melmoth changes the island and its inhabitants: as the young woman’s tempter he introduces knowledge and suffering to her. Each embedded story thus has its own space that we as reader enter into when we enter into the embedded narrative. Spatial transgressions and the transgression of narrative boundaries are linked to the moral transgressions of Melmoth the Wanderer. Each new embedded story tells of another one of his attempts to trade his powers for the soul of a victim and thus end his sad existence as a creature who has fallen through Faustian sins into the state of a soulless devil and tempter. As explained in the section on intertextuality, Melmoth is an archetypal transgressor who tries to turn others into trangressors as well. The different stories all revolve around this goal – which, until the end of the novel, remains unnamed. Whenever one of his victims tries to relate what Melmoth wants them to do in order to free them from their misery (which, in some cases, they have induced themselves), they fail or tell it in a way that shields the actual content from the reader. There are different devices that stress the unspeakable nature of Melmoth’s secret. The mutilated manuscript, whose crucial passages are unreadable, and Monçada’s difficulties to even say the name ‘Melmoth’ are just two examples. The power Melmoth exerts over his potential victims is immense and traumatizing. When they are tempted, they are often close to accepting Melmoth’s offer. Yet, they never cross the border into the realm of the devil. At the same time, the narrator decides that they will not reveal their offer to the reader. There are hints, but most of the time Melmoth’s price remains in the dark. The first manuscript John reads at his uncle’s house tells the story of a man imprisoned in a madhouse who is offered freedom by Melmoth. This man is unable to write Melmoth’s offer down: “It is remarkable, that he too, […] never disclosed to mortal the particulars of their conversation in the mad-house; and the slightest allusion to it threw him into fits of rage and gloom”.184 The unhappy Elinore from one of the many embedded stories confides her secret to a priest, but John Melmoth and the reader do not hear it. The priest himself had been tempted by Melmoth, who had promised him “the knowledge and the power of the future world – on conditions that are unutterable”.185 Monçada himself also keeps the secret when he recounts to John Melmoth how Melmoth offered to free him from the Inquisition: “[H]e certainly took advantage of my agony, halfvisionary, half-real as it was, and, while proving to me that he had the power of effecting my escape from the Inquisition, proposed to me that incommunicable condition which I am forbid to reveal, except in the act of confession”.186 And finally, the father in the “Guzman’s Tale” whispers to his wife: “He has offered, and proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity could thirst for, on the condition that – 184

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 499. 186 Ibid., 237. 185

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I cannot utter! It is one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it!”187 The condition is incommunicable or unutterable because talk of the secret would mean moral transgression. The utterance of Melmoth’s offer to the wretched individuals remains without a concrete signified until Melmoth himself appears in the frame narrative. Melmoth’s secret is thus buried under many layers of secondary or tertiary report.188 The embedded narratives only revolve around the secret of the text.189 They approach it from different angles and tell it in different voices, but they fail to arrive at a truth because it is too horrible to be assigned a linguistic form or content. The secret must remain unspoken, though not unheard. While this is a narrative device to maintain the reader’s suspense, it also shows the power of language. To write or to speak the secret is dangerous and would mean that the speaker transgresses into Melmoth’s realm. The moral transgression in a narrative depends on its relations through words. So long as the words are not uttered, the speaker remains in the ethically sound realm. The different characters and intradiegetic narrators only approach the moral boundary. Melmoth cannot linger at that boundary. He has to find another subject in order to repeat his attempt. Each attempt to force a transgression is thus already a narrative transgression from one embedded story into the next. The reader and the implied reader of the frame narrative (John Melmoth) accompany Melmoth on his boundary crossings as he jumps from embedded narrative to embedded narrative without ever arriving at the truth. John Melmoth hears most of the stories from Monçada, who reports his own encounter with Melmoth in the Inquisition’s prison, but mainly recounts stories from a manuscript containing accounts of Melmoth. The Guzman’s tale is an interesting case because it is very deeply hidden beneath different layers of the novel. The layers are not easily picked apart because Melmoth is not as symmetrically built as for example Frankenstein is. In the frame narrative (F) Monçada tells John the story of his life (M). At one point of this story, he reads an old manuscript in which the “Indian Tale” tells of Isidora’s encounter with Melmoth (I). In this story, a stranger reads the “Tale of Guzman’s Family” to her father from a manuscript. If we use letters for each of the stories (there are many other embedded stories which are left out in this

187

Ibid., 427. According to Baldick these layers protect the reader from the horror of transgression. Baldick, “Introduction,” x. Another explanation for the many layers is given by Mark M. Hennelly Jr. He argues that the many readers and listeners create a doppelgänger relationship between the reader and the fictional audience leading to emotional catharsis with an existential function. See Mark M. Jr. Hennelly, “Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism,” Studies in English Literature 21.4 (1981): 666. 189 John Stott gives a graphic representation of the embedded stories. He also argues that the different stories give the reader clues that bring him or her closer to Melmoth’s secret. He defends Maturin against critics who judge the novel’s structure to be chaotic and full of flaws. Stott, “The Structure of Melmoth the Wanderer,” 42f.

188

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schema to avoid confusion), the Guzman tale (G) is positioned like this: F(M (I(G)I)M)F. The Guzman family, by unfortunate circumstances and the greed of the Catholic Church, has lost everything and its members are forced to beg, sell their blood, and prostitute themselves. The father goes insane and only recovers slowly at the end of the tale. He almost commits parricide and even attempts to kill his children. Again, he comes close to moral transgression. On the verge of starvation he is made an offer by Melmoth he almost cannot refuse. In his state of insanity, the father is not quite certain whether he imagined Melmoth or not (Monçada has the same experience in the dungeon of the Inquisition where he is visited nightly by Melmoth). He loses control of his senses and his actions. There are numerous other examples of madness in the novel: Stanton in the madhouse, Monçada in prison, and John Sandal, who lost the love of his life. Crossing into the realm of madness is a form of transgression typical of the Gothic novel.190 Disintegration of the self means a loss of boundaries. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael finds an interesting simile for the mental state of man: “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”191 Ishmael supplies a spatial metaphor for a mental problem. Once man leaves the safe space of the island, he plunges into the dangerous openness of the sea and is lost. Once a person loses their inner boundaries to madness, they might be lost forever. Ahab suffers from the dissolution of his inner boundaries because he is outwardly involved in transgression. Melmoth is the transgressor, but the proximity to transgression leads to the dissolution of other subjects’ boundaries. These subjects experience severe traumata and exhibit symptoms of madness. This makes them unreliable narrators. Not only do they have trouble telling their stories, their madness also renders their entire accounts unbelievable. Until Melmoth appears and can speak for himself, only unreliable clues as to how to identify Melmoth and his secret are provided for the reader. In the stories themselves, the narrators always stay on the surface of Melmoth using phrases that indicate their own uncertainty about him. A couple of examples serve to illustrate the narrators’ evasive manoeuvres: Melmoth “seemed to suspend the diabolical instinct [my emphasis]”,192 “moving his frame like one agitated by deep and uneasy thoughts [my emphasis]”,193 or “bringing out words with difficulty, and, as it appeared, with some feeling

190

Trautwein describes the loss of the self (Ich-Verlust) as a typical trait of the genre of Gothic literature. See Trautwein, Erlesene Angst, 48f. 191 Melville, Moby-Dick, 274. 192 Maturin, Melmoth, 365. 193 Ibid., 375.

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for his victim [my emphasis]”.194 Like Ahab, Melmoth has hidden depths to which no one can descend. The fact that the reader’s discovery of Melmoth’s secret is deferred through different layers of text and through narrative unreliability is reflected upon by the extra- and intradiegetic narrators. At one point, Melmoth himself tells one of the stories for a second time. He calls on Don Aliaga, his audience, to have patience with one last narrative: “‘You assure me it will be brief,’ said Aliaga. ‘Not only so, but the last I shall obtrude on your patience,’ replied the stranger.”195 The reader can also be assured that this is almost the last embedded story. Monçada finishes the “Indian Tale” some thirty pages later. The twice-told tale is that of Isidora – the young woman on the island who is the main protagonist in “Indian Tale”. In “Indian Tale”, Melmoth tells her story in a briefer version to that her father tells. After this, Isidora’s story continues. In short notation, the structure looks like this F(M(I(I’)I)M)F. Another version – or a mirror version – of I (I’) is told within I. While the other stories repeat or reflect their topics (imprisonment in three cases, lost love in at least four cases, impending madness in four stories, disintegration of families, and religious zeal and bigotry in most stories), this story is entirely self-reflective.196 It not only further complicates the deferral of the truth, but it also illustrates the power of language to become self-reflexive and take control of its referents. The reader is caught in fragmented, incomplete, unreliable, and apparently never-ending language games. The embedded tales finally release the reader when Monçada finishes his report. The extradiegetic narrator, who started the novel by telling the reader about John’s arrival, returns and remarks: Young Melmoth, (whose name perhaps the reader has forgot), did ‘seriously incline’ to the purpose of having his dangerous curiosity further gratified, nor was he perhaps altogether without the wild hope of seeing the original of that portrait he had destroyed, burst from the walls and take up the fearful tale himself.197

The narrator knows that he put the reader through an ordeal.198 And he now hopes, just like John, that the elusive Melmoth will clarify the multiple accounts of his wanderings. Indeed, this hope is fulfilled and Melmoth makes his final appearance. The time he had to acquire a new soul has run out and he tells his story before he dies. What he reveals to John and the reader is, however, nothing new. The Faust/Mephisto intertext (or even 194

Ibid., 375. Ibid., 502. 196 Repetition is a common means of intensifying the terror in Gothic fiction (See Trautwein, Erlesene Angst, 54.). The self-reflexive quality of some of the repetitions coincides with Menninghaus’s assessment of self-reflexivity as a typical Romantic trait that precedes or even surpasses Derrida’s theory of differance. See Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdoppelung. Die frühromantische Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987). 197 Maturin, Melmoth, 534. 198 On reader frustration see Hennelly, “Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism,” 666. 195

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topos) and the numerous hints have already given everyone a fairly good idea of the purpose of his wanderings. The “substance and the great items”, as Ishmael puts it, of his bargain with the devil are revealed, but some things remain hidden. The narrator of the frame tale grants the reader only one insight into Melmoth: Melmoth’s dream of his descent into hell. Since it is just a dream, its factuality is not established either. Melmoth may be in hell, or not. The last trace John and Monçada find of him, the handkerchief, does not clarify his fate, nor does it give an account of what it feels like to live without a soul.199 In the end, Melmoth remains as confusing and multi-layered as the novel bearing his name in its title. All that is left of Melmoth is this transgressive text with the deferred signified. As in the example from Moby-Dick, the multiple layers, the unreliable sources, and the difficulty of narrating lead to the deferral of the signified. In both novels, the intradiegetic narrators force the reader to transgress several narrative boundaries before he or she can arrive at meaning. In both cases, this crossing involves a change of location that emphasizes the transgression in spatial terms. In both cases, the core truth of the story remains at least partially hidden. The structure of the embedded tales is more complex in Melmoth because it mirrors the approximate nature of the transgressive actions in the novel which are depicted through other mechanisms in Moby-Dick (Ishmael’s schizonarration). Both novels have a narrative structure that is based on the tension between absolute signified (what exactly are Melmoth or Moby Dick) and the deferral of meaning. The awareness of this tension is higher in Moby-Dick because Ishmael constantly reflects on the process of narration and on his own limits which, in turn, trigger his desire for subject a-limitation and spatial a-limitation.

Whose world is this? From story to discourse and back Moby-Dick: Ishmael between the worlds The unreliability of the narrators in Moby-Dick and Melmoth partially results from their position as first person narrators. A first person narrator can only possess limited knowledge of the world around him. He can only enter the possible worlds of other protagonists to a certain point. He is hindered by protagonists who keep their wishes, fantasies, and knowledge hidden from him. Furthermore, his unreliability generally questions his ability to determine which of the many worlds (including his own) is the valid world or the actual world of the text which the reader can base her interpretation on. This section explores the crossing of narrative boundaries with the help of the world-metaphor in Moby-Dick and in greater detail in E.T.A Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf. 199

Stott, “The Structure of Melmoth the Wanderer,” 50.

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What is meant by world-metaphor? The text functions as a bubble that is the home of many overlapping bubbles. These bubbles are different spaces assigned to one or more literary subjects. Each subject can also have different worlds – spaces in which he or she revels in wishes or fantasies. They contradict and coincide with the possible worlds of other subjects. The reader needs to find her way through these bubbles to find the one containing what she reads as the meaning of the text. The narrator can function as a guide through the multiplicity of worlds, but he can also be caught up in one of the worlds. Ishmael has a tendency to surpass the boundaries of the classic first person narrator, but he never becomes a complete heterodiegetic narrator with the ability to focalize through everyone. He does not have complete insight into his chief objects (Ahab and the whale). Ishmael, however, keeps diving until he faces depths he cannot penetrate. He has an uncanny tendency to vanish into the text. For a chapter, or even a paragraph, he is present as the first person narrator and protagonist, and then he suddenly retreats into the text by giving extensive theoretical explanations, by focalizing through a different person, or by interrupting the narrative entirely so that the characters of the novel speak without any mediation. Since the novel begins with Ishmael as a first person narrator, the reader expects his presence throughout the story and is likely to be bewildered by his absence in some passages. Ishmael’s meandering through the text, his de- and reterritorialization as a subject, is an unusual crossing of narrative boundaries. His movement between the young protagonist Ishmael and the narrating self of the older Ishmael is so subtle that the schizonarration can escape the reader’s notice. Ishmael’s movement could also be perceived as a partaking of different worlds. If each narrator and each character in a text has his or her own world that is based on his or her knowledge, wishes, fantasies, and goals, Ishmael has the ability to enter the worlds of the different characters to a certain degree. The chapter on the doubloon that represents something different for each crew member exemplifies not only the pragmatic dimension of semiotics but also its cognitive basis. Each person lives in a different world that is determined by various factors. Of course, monomaniac Ahab, who can only think of himself or the whale, sees only himself. The pious Starbuck is bound to see the Holy Trinity wherever something threefold appears. A simpler mind, finally, sees the number of cigars such a coin can pay for. Ishmael can report on these individual worlds. He knows about Ahab’s hatred for the inscrutable whale; he knows about Starbuck’s longing to get home safely and his religious feelings; he knows about the superstitions of the other crew man. However, his access to these other worlds is only partial. As a result, the world he presents to the reader is incomplete.

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Der goldne Topf: Dresden or Atlantis? The movement between different worlds and the question, which world is the one the reader can trust, can be observed in many Romantic texts. Gothic fiction in particular with its multi-layered embedded stories often challenges the reader to choose one of the narrators’ worlds as his or her accepted version of the truth.200 An early German text that offers the supernatural alongside the ordinary to the reader’s scrutiny and that also questions the stability of different worlds is E.T.A Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (The golden pot) first published in 1814. Two major transgressions or even dissolutions of the boundaries of possible worlds can be identified in Der goldne Topf. The first transgression concerns the problem of the fantastic and the real worlds. The second transgression happens between the world of the seemingly heterodiegetic narrator and the world of the story. The “Märchen aus der neuen Zeit” (fairytale from recent times) as the subtitle designates the narrative, starts in a familiar setting. A young man runs through a town gate.201 He leaves Dresden, but he also enters a fantastic world. The crossing of thresholds is not only a strong indicator of initiation rituals (in the course of the narrative Anselmus becomes a poet) but also a demarcation of boundaries that spatially define the story’s world. The young man who stumbles into his adventure is the student Anselmus, whom the narrator describes as a clumsy and melancholy fellow. After running over an old, slightly creepy woman and having to pay for her lost apples, Anselmus slumps down by the river to contemplate his spoiled holiday. In a soliloquy he bemoans his infelicity. His toast always lands with the buttered side to the floor. When he puts on a new jacket, he immediately stains it, or tears it on a nail. When he tries to greet someone, he accidentally throws his hat away, and so on. He then starts to dream about a better, alternative world in which he actually goes to the Linkische Bad, and is gracefully flirting with the festive-looking girls. The audible contemplation of his wish world is interrupted by voices issuing from the elder bush he is sitting underneath of. Three little green and golden snakes are talking in crystal-like voices. Anselmus is astonished but tries to rationalize his experience: “‘Das ist die Abendsonne, die so in dem Holunderbusch spielt’, dachte der Student Anselmus“.202 (‘It is the setting sun that is twinkling in the elder bush,’ the student Anselmus thought.) Anselmus loses his composure when one of the snakes looks at him with wonderful blue eyes, the elder bush addresses him, and the snakes are called away by a distant voice. He starts shaking the bush and calls for the snake to return to him. He has developed a strong longing for the strange snake – Anselmus is in love. Since the logic of 200

See for example Frankenstein or James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. 201 See E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der goldne Topf. Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004) 5ff. 202 Ibid., 10.

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the narrative is that love leads to knowledge, this longing is more than physical desire. Anselmus has tasted poetic truth and desires more of it. The object of Anselmus’s desire is Serpentina, daughter of the Archivarius Lindhorst, who is also a salamander and a vulture, and who has one great opponent in the shape of the old witch, who is also a field mangel. Anselmus’s first encounter with the fantastic world of the golden snake Serpentina is carefully staged. First of all, the scene takes place outside of the city. Anselmus has left society because his disposition excludes him from normal spaces. Second, Anselmus is also inclined to dwell in his own wish and fantasy worlds. The spatial transgression therefore anticipates crossing into a different world. This wish world functions as the transition to an even remoter world: the fantastic world of the speaking elder bush and the snakes. This world is determined by the merging of nature with semiotics and by the merging of human with animal. The elder bush explains to Anselmus: “‘Du lagst in meinem Schatten, mein Duft umfloss dich, aber du verstandest mich nicht. Der Duft ist meine Sprache, wenn ihn die Liebe entzündet.’”203 (‘You were resting in my shadow and you smelled my fragrance, but you did not understand. Fragrance is my language that is ignited by love.’) It is a world in the state of becoming, where women metamorphosize into snakes, men into parrots or salamanders, and where nature can still speak. The magical semiotics of Serpentina’s world is based on natural language ideas and indecipherable signs. In order to belong to this world, one has to understand the language of nature and be able to decipher the signs on the Archivarius’s old manuscripts.204 The Archivarius was banned from his world because of his incest with a lily and has been condemned to spend his days in the unhappy times in which “die Sprache der Natur dem entarteten Geschlecht der Menschen nicht mehr verständlich sein [wird]”205 (the language of nature will no longer be understood by depraved humankind). He can only return to paradise if he is able to marry off his three snake-daughters to young men who have childlike, poetic minds and understand the language of nature. The young couples can then also live in Atlantis, the hidden paradise where no boundaries between semiotics and nature exist. Anselmus is one of these young men. He can already understand the elder bush and when he is asked to copy the strange manuscripts for the Archivarius, he slowly understands their meaning as well: Und so wie er voll innern Entzückens die Töne vernahm, wurden ihm immer verständlicher die unbekannten Zeichen – er durfte kaum mehr hineinblicken in das Original – ja es war, als stün203

Ibid., 10. Friedrich Kittler describes this as a sequence in an initiation rite. First, the (female) voices talk to Anselmus, which is the oral initiation. Then Anselmus copies down writing and is corrected by the father figure, Archivarius Lindhorst. Around 1800, teaching a person to write also meant producing an individual. This also shows the strong connection between semiotics and subjectivity. Kittler identifies the writing on the parchments as “Natur als Urschrift” (nature as original language) (105), but also as Sanskrit. This kind of Romantic writing oscillates between nature and culture. 205 Hoffmann, Der goldne Topf, 69. 204

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den schon wie in blasser Schrift die Zeichen auf dem Pergament, und er dürfe sie nur mit geübter Hand schwarz überziehen.206 (Listening to these sounds with inner joy, he began to understand the unknown ciphers – he did not even have to look at the original – yes, it seemed as if they were already transparently written on his paper, and he only had to retrace them in black ink with his practiced hand.)

Crossing into the fantastic world of Serpentina requires Anselmus’s belief in her world and the deciphering of its code. The boundary is therefore mental as well as semiotic. Anselmus is predisposed to both believe in this world and to understand its particular language, but he does not stay in the fantasy world the first time he enters into it. Instead, he keeps going back and forth between the fantasy world and the ordinary world of Dresden. Having just seen the snakes depart, he angrily shakes the elder bush until a passing townswoman sees him and remarks, “Der Herr ist wohl nicht ganz bei Troste!”207 (This gentleman is off his head!) Suddenly he feels as if he were waking from a dream. After a short conversation with the townspeople, he leaves the fantasy world: Alles was er Wunderbares gesehen, war ihm rein aus dem Gedächtnis geschwunden, und er besann sich nur, dass er unter dem Holunderbaum allerlei tolles Zeug ganz laut geschwatzt, was ihm denn umso entsetzlicher war, als er von jeher einen innerlichen Abscheu gegen Selbstredner gehegt.208 (Everything fantastic that he had seen was erased from his memory. He only remembered that he had very loudly talked a lot of nonsense under the elder bush, which horrified him even more since he had always despised people talking to themselves.)

Anselmus rejects Serpentina’s world as madness and he feels ashamed of his transgression into a world that does not coincide with his aspired bourgeois reality. However, the soliloquy that he remembers in the quotation above was actually about his own wish world that was set in the park of Dresden. His strong fantasy has opened the gates to two different possible worlds. One is set in Dresden where Anselmus is just not as clumsy or inept as he is in reality, and one is a world in which animals and plants can talk. At first, Anselmus decides to leave the second (fantasy) world entirely behind and joins his friends Registrator Heerbrand and Konrektor Paulmann, and the Konrektor’s daughter Veronika on a boat trip. Yet, on the boat, he sees the golden snakes again and almost jumps over board to join them in the water. While the others think him ill or mad, Anselmus is torn between the two worlds he seems to live in. The next crossing into the fantasy world takes place when he goes to the house of the Archivarius to copy his manuscripts. Again, a spatial transgression is necessary: the house is old and stands in a remote part of town. Anselmus cannot enter it because the door knob suddenly turns into an old witch. Later on, he attributes this experience to the liquor he had con206

Ibid., 53. Ibid., 12. 208 Ibid., 13. 207

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sumed before going to the Archivarius. The Archivarius’s wild tales about his origin give Anselmus the courage to confide in the Archivarius about his experience with the door knob, the elder bush, and the snakes. He learns that everything he saw is true and that the snake with the blue eyes is Serpentina, the Archivarius’s beautiful daughter. By finally entering into the Archivarius’s house, Anselmus is drawn deeper into the fantasy world. Anselmus notices how the fantasy world starts to turn into his actual world, the world he believes to be real and true: “denn ich sehe und fühle nun wohl, dass alle die fremden Gestalten aus einer fernen wundervollen Welt, die ich sonst nur in ganz besondern merkwürdigen Träumen schaute, jetzt in mein waches reges Leben geschritten sind und ihr Spiel mit mir treiben“.209 (now I can see and feel that all the strange figures from this distant and wonderful world, which until now I have only seen in very strange dreams, have walked into my life and are playing games with me.) A few days later he seems entirely lost in this world, but he is drawn back into the bourgeois world by his love for Veronika (the ordinary double of Serpentina). The constant shifting between worlds, his indecisiveness, leads to a grave mistake. The moment he stops believing in the fantasy world, he loses Serpentina’s love and his ability to copy the manuscripts. He makes a huge ink stain on an original manuscript and finds himself locked inside a crystal bottle. Only in the fantasy world is Anselmus locked in a crystal bottle in the Archivarius’s library. In the other world, he stands on a bridge and stares into the river. This information is delivered to the reader by a couple of students who are passing by (he takes them for other people locked in bottles next to himself). From his bottle, Anselmus witnesses a fight between the Archivarius and the old witch, who tries to kill Serpentina and take her dowry, the golden pot, with her. Wanting to save Serpentina, he bursts free and embraces her. This embrace marks his final crossing into the fantasy world, where he moves to Atlantis with Serpentina and becomes a poet. If Anselmus now lives in his fantasy world, what has become of the real world? In the course of the narrative, the narrator sometimes switches to Veronika and Anselmus’s friends as focalizers. In the penultimate chapter, Anselmus has disappeared and the others do not know what has become of him. A cross on the shore of the river indicates his whereabouts. The reader may infer that, in this world, Anselmus has perhaps jumped off the bridge on which he had his last great vision of Serpentina. This is one of the more frequent interpretations of the narrative that is based on the assumption that Serpentina’s world is Anselmus’s fantasy world, or a poetic allegory as Heerbrand calls it.210 According to this claim, the space of the narrative has a textual actual world that is constructed by Heerbrand, Paulmann, and the other townspeople. Anselmus’s fantasy world renders him insane in the eyes of the others. His strange experiences thus 209 210

Ibid., 35. See ibid., 95.

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have to be attributed to increasing insanity that culminates in a desperate jump from the bridge. The idea that Anselmus’s fantasy world is actually a world of insanity is hinted at in the narrative by many of the townspeople who witness Anselmus’s alienating behaviour. Anselmus himself sometimes thinks that he might be going mad, and the narrator speaks of madness on several occasions. The narrator describes Anselmus’s feelings when he is locked inside the crystal bottle as follows: “Er konnte kein Glied regen, […] und er vernahm statt der Worte, die der Geist sonst aus dem Innern gesprochen, nur das dumpfe Brausen des Wahnsinns.”211 (He could not move his limbs, […] and instead of the word that he usually heard from his inner mind, he only perceived the hollow roar of madness.) If Anselmus is really mad, then his madness has indeed spread to Veronika as Heerbrand suspects: “Merken Sie denn nicht, dass [Anselmus] schon längst mente captus ist? Aber wissen Sie denn nicht auch, dass der Wahnsinn ansteckt?”212 (Don’t you realize that Anselmus has long been mente captus? But don’t you know that madness is contagious?) Heerbrand tries to explain that all of them, in their drunkenness, mistook the Archivarius for a grey parrot because Anselmus spoke of so many fantastic things. Paulmann’s explanation that it was just a small man in a coat and a lot of punch may suffice to stabilize the actual world in this instance. There are, however, instances that remain unexplained and that prove the equal claim Serpentina’s world has on the actual world of the text. In the fifth chapter, Veronika focalizes. She witnesses a conversation between her father, Konrektor Paulmann, and Registrator Heerbrand in which they talk about Anselmus’s prospects. She starts to dream about Anselmus’s promotion to the rank of Hofrat and their marriage. Her wish world resembles the one Anselmus dreamed of under the elder bush before he first saw Serpentina. Her wish world also triggers the same fantasy world: she suddenly hears a voice telling her that she will never marry Anselmus, and sees a little mandrake in her room. She tells her friends about what she saw and one of them recommends an old woman who can look into the future. Veronika decides to seek her advice about her future with Anselmus. The old woman turns out to be the same woman Anselmus has several unpleasant encounters with. She also lives outside of the city gates in a remote street and her house is full of talking animals. She explains the marks on her face to Veronika: Anselmus poured liquor in her face when she, disguised as a door knob, tried to keep him from entering the Archivarius’s house. Later on Veronika can see Anselmus through a special mirror that the old witch creates for her. She knows about the copying and about the crystal bottle although Anselmus could not have told her about these aspects of the fantasy world. This means that Anselmus and Veronika both share a fantasy world. Independently of one another, they both partake in a possible world that seems to exist 211 212

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 90.

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alongside the other possible world of ‘normal’ life in Dresden. The only difference is that Veronika’s perambulations in the fantasy world, her boundary crossings, end on the side of Dresden. She is able to realize her bourgeois wish world and marry the recently promoted Heerbrand while Anselmus remains on the other side of the boundary. This constellation is a case of liminal semiotics because the stability of the textual world is questioned by the existence of two parallel worlds. If there are two worlds that seem to have equal right to the status of the actual world, the world that tells the reader the truth and harbours the meaning of the story, someone is needed to point the reader to the right one. If the reader is seeking epistemological clarity, he or she has no choice but to rely on the authority of the narrator. Luckily, the narrator does have authority. He is omnipresent, has insight into the minds of different protagonists, and seems to be in control of the story. He seems to be a typical authorial narrator who comments on Anselmus and on the act of narration. In the fourth chapter, or the fourth vigil (there are twelve vigils/chapters), he directly addresses the reader in order to better explain Anselmus’s disposition. He asks the reader if he does not also sometimes have the feeling that the world looks just too ordinary. He speaks of “ein dunkles Gefühl, es müsse irgendwo und zu irgendeiner Zeit ein hoher, den Kreis alles irdischen Genusses überschreitender Wunsch erfüllt werden”.213 (a dim feeling that somewhere, sometime a great wish that transgresses all earthly pleasure has to be fulfilled) He appeals to the reader to follow Anselmus into the wonderfully transgressive world, to believe in this world where the goddess lifts her veil.214 These phrases show that the narrator takes both worlds seriously, but attributes a higher value to Serpentina’s world because it is the world of truth (the allusion to the veil of Sais supports this assumption). At this point in the story, Anselmus is already on his way to this world. He is filled with the desire to leave the city and walk through woods and meadows without any restraints. He is already shunning the many boundaries of the real world and tries to exchange them for a world that is in the state of becoming. The narrator shares Anselmus’s desire to transgress and dissolve boundaries. In the ninth vigil, he addresses the reader once more. This time he not only asks the reader to put himself in Anselmus’s position, but he imagines the reader to be part of his story. He pictures the reader passing by the cross-roads on the night when Veronika and the old witch are performing their ritual to bind Anselmus to Veronika. He contemplates that the reader could have put an end to this evil magic, but then admits that the reader could not have been there and the ritual was completed. This passage shows that the narrator is testing the permeability of boundaries. The reader’s imagination and the text can interact, but the reader cannot physically cross the boundary into the text. That is why he continues to appeal to the reader’s imagination (for example asking him to 213 214

Ibid., 28. See ibid., 29.

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imagine what it feels like to be locked in a crystal bottle). The narrator can only create an implied reader, a semiotic being in his text. However, this is not where the narrator’s desire to cross boundaries ends. As the designated author of the narrative, he also comments on the difficulties of writing his book. In the last vigil, he admits that he has difficulties finishing his story because he still lingers in the ordinary world that Anselmus has left. Like Anselmus, he feels a longing for something more, something deeper and despairs to describe Anselmus’s existence in Atlantis. To his own surprise, he receives a letter from the Archivarius Lindhorst who invites him to his house. The heterodiegetic narrator suddenly enters his own story. This is more than a change of narrative perspective. The author-narrator becomes part of his story. This form of metalepsis is a result of the narrator’s desire for a-limitation. He wants to tear down the boundaries between world and text, but he can only do it within the text. The Archivarius offers him punch and the narrator has a vision of Anselmus and Serpentina in Atlantis that also appears in writing on the paper in front of him. Just like Anselmus, he believes in this fantastic world, but unlike Anselmus he does not remain in it. The Archivarius comforts him: through literature we can all be in Atlantis. The narrator’s acceptance of and his desire for the fantasy world valorizes it above the ordinary world. In the end, the reader could question the authority of this narrator, who seems authorial but then becomes involved in his own story, because he refuses to tell the reader the source of his story and also because he drinks punch with the Archivarius and thus participates in the same drunken visionary madness the protagonists experience. The reader has to decide which world he or she would pick – both of them could be the actual world of the text. Thus, this is a case of a threefold semiotic a-limitation. First, the possible world preferred by Anselmus and the narrator is defined by alimitation (becoming-animal, natural semiotics). Second, the fantasy world and the real world merge in the narrative. Their boundary is unstable and the determination of the actual world is unclear. Third, the narrator is also involved in attempted and completed boundary crossing (reader-story, author-narrator-story). What the narrator of Der goldne Topf and Ishmael have in common is that they change their narrative perspectives so crossing the boundary between their narrative act (discourse) and the story they are telling. Their starting points are different. Ishmael starts from the story, while the narrator of Der goldne Topf materializes as an ‘I’ after a third of the narrative when the reader has long forgotten the act of narrative mediation. Both narrators have a tendency to use their materialization as a subject to express their desire for a-limitation. While Ishmael stays cautious and avoids complete a-limitation, the narrator in Der goldne Topf wants to cross the boundary into the fantasy world as well, but he is unable to do so.215 The magic semiotics presented through the fantasy 215

As narrators, Ishmael and the narrator of Der goldne Topf have limited access to the truth, but neither are they destroyed by it. Dryden demonstrates that this is one of the functions that Melville attributes to literature: “By turning his back on life and entering a world which does not exist, the

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world is mirrored in the entanglement of the different possible worlds and their truth is reaffirmed by the narrator’s choice of a-limitation.

Summary and Ishmael’s rhizomatic book Each narrative text analyzed in this chapter exhibits different traits of semiotic a-limitation that can be traced back to the tension between the belief in a transcendent signifier (and signified) and constant deferral of meaning. In Der goldne Topf this tension is expressed through the display of natural semiotics on the one hand and the copying of indecipherable manuscripts on the other. The magic semiotics affects the narrative structure of the tale by destabilizing its interpretative core. Each of the possible worlds in the text is potentially the actual world of the text. A less radical version of different possible worlds can also be found in Das Marmorbild, where Forio and Fortunato have very different experiences in the secret garden – none of which seem to be privileged as the actual world by the narrator.216 In Der goldne Topf the possible world favored by the narrator, who tries to inscribe himself in his own story but fails to materialize in the fantastic world, remains inaccessible. The only glimpses of this world the narrator and the reader are allowed to have are mediated by the Archivarius (narrating his origin), a manuscript (that Anselmus copies and understands with the help of Serpentina), or a punch-induced vision (that the narrator has with some aid from the Archivarius). A narrative boundary defers the true nature of the fantastic possible world. To cross this boundary seems hardly possible. Thus, the textual world of Der goldne Topf is not only defined by transgressive possible worlds and an unstable actual world, but it is also removed from the reader through the device of embedded tales. In the case of Der goldne Topf, the truth about poetic life in Atlantis is only one narrative boundary away, while other texts such as Moby-Dick and, representing the genre of Gothic literature, Melmoth the Wanderer make more extensive use of this device to withhold the signified of the text from the reader. Entangled in multiple tales, the truth about the wicked wanderer and the white whale remains deeply hidden. The reader is forced to cross a new boundary only to face another (white) wall that defers interpretation. Sometimes the narrators refuse to relate what they know, and sometimes

writer is able to approach the ‘axis of reality’ without being destroyed or driven mad. Fiction, paradoxically, puts man in touch with Truth while protecting him from it.” Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 26. 216 Klaus Lindemann explains that the poet (i.e. the narrator) does not resolve the contradictions between the two experiences. See Klaus Lindemann, “Von der Naturphilosophie zur christlichen Kunst. Zur Funktion des Venusmotivs in Tiecks Runenberg und Eichendorffs Marmorbild,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 15 (1974): 114.

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they are unable to do so because of the transgression this communication would entail. The secret core of each story is something unspeakable.217 A-limitation can take different forms ranging from the careful testing of boundaries to their total dissolution. Total semiotic dissolution cannot be identified in any of the Romantic texts discussed in this section. It is a trait of Modernist literature and texts, for instance James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake which uses known semiotic systems in a nonsensical way. Total dissolution entails an end-point in a process.218 Death or disappearance is therefore an exceptional case of a-limitation, which is, by definition, something dynamic, something moving. The background for these dynamics is the tension between the absolute signified and the infinitely deferred signified. The belief in absolute linguistic truth is shattered. There is an awareness that the original (in some cases Adamic) language is lost and cannot be recreated. The attempt to create something resembling a natural semiotics is deliberately assigned to certain possible worlds. In Das Marmorbild and in Der goldne Topf the possible worlds where nature can speak and works of art or animals can be transformed into humans are desirable, but form no ‘homesteads’. The protagonist Florio opts against the uncanny magic semiotics and the narrator in Der goldne Topf cannot remain in his preferred world. The protagonist Anselmus, however, after going back and forth, crosses into the fantastic space of natural semiotics. He can understand what seems indecipherable to the reader. To Ishmael, natural semiotics (signs on whales, people, coins) also remains indecipherable. Once motivated, the signs have become labyrinths and hieroglyphs. Ishmael’s book documents his attempt to understand the signs of the world and his failure to interpret and represent the truth. He succeeds partially because his desire for knowledge and his curiosity are anchored in a time when truth was still possible. He also fails because language, just like the white whale, cannot be controlled. Ishmael is caught between the desire for interpretation and the impossibility of interpretation. He goes back and forth between his attempts to understand and represent and his frustrated admissions of failure. This oscillation can also be detected in his desire for subject a-limi217

Melville perfected the art of the refusal to communicate in “Bartleby the Scrivener”, but a paradigmatic example of embedded secrets can be found in The Encantadas, a series of sketches of the Galapagos Islands as a variant of Gothic space. One of the sketches focuses on a woman discovered on an island whose secret remains hidden just as the undecipherable signs on the shells of the island’s tortoises. Kathleen Wheeler calls Hunilla “the paradigm of an enigma”. Her secret (just like the tortoises’ secret) is never revealed. Instead the narrator employs various stylistic devices to defer meaning and point to the process of storytelling and interpretation. Like the other texts discussed in this chapter, Huntilla’s story is self-reflexive. See the unpublished manuscript by Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Art of Tale-telling, or Not Telling. Sketch Eight, Hunilla, Cambridge. 218 Ahab’s case is an interesting example of such dissolution. His final becoming-whale is still a dynamic action. He is enclosed by boundaries and freed of all boundaries at the same time. On the one hand, he is swallowed by the whale (closure) and on the other hand he becomes whale which entails becoming sea. He is therefore completely deterritorialized by his incorporation into the whale’s body.

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tation and his care not to allow his own disintegration to go too far. Ishmael knows that getting too close to the ocean, to fire, or to Moby Dick means annihilation. He does not jump into the water (or Atlantis) like Anselmus does, nor does he become whale like Ahab, but he does not leave like Florio does either. He remains inbetween safety and death until the very end of his narrative. The result of this form of a-limitation as the crossing or approximation of boundaries that is followed by new boundaries is expressed by Ishmael’s schizonarration, the alternation between narrative appearances and absences, but also by the way he wants to structure and write his book. In the section on schizonarration I demonstrated how the reflection of the narrative process is part of Ishmael’s manifestation as narrating self, and in the section on intertexts I showed that he expresses anxieties about his narrative that are typical of the Modernist language crisis. These two previous sections have looked at Ishmael’s strategies of narration and composition and his way of dealing with the liminal semiotics of Romanticism. Since Ishmael is not only a narrator, but a narrator who is aware of his narration and even aware of his writing process, his own reflection of that process contributes to the overall semiotic agenda of the book. Ishmael’s own semiotic agenda of narration, his poetics, is determined by his desire to narrate something that he does not quite understand himself. In the section on intertextuality I quoted from his comments on the narrative difficulties he experiences at the beginning of chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”. Ishmael struggles with the intensity and the ineffability of his subject: “I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.”219 Yet, his despair does not prevent him from trying: “But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.”220 In order to write a book Ishmael has to try to interpret and represent, but this quotation shows that it may not be a perfect book. In some passages Ishmael aspires to explain himself more clearly. He structures the reading process by establishing a logical succession of topics. There are numerous examples of this kind of ordering. In the passages discussed in the section on uncanny ekphrasis, he explains that he will start by showing some pictures of the whale to the reader before talking about the whale itself. Thus he slowly approaches his grand topic. At a later point in the novel, he adds some comments about a ship the Pequod had just encountered: “Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby…”.221 While the subject of his narrative seems to be difficult to explain, Ishmael strives to facilitate the reader’s journey through the narrative. He tries to anticipate the reader’s reaction to his claims and scrutinizes his own process of narration over and over again. At one point he calls on himself to further explain how he acquired some of his knowledge concerning whale anatomy and thus introduces the reader to more back219

Melville, Moby-Dick, 188. Ibid., 188. 221 Ibid., 443. 220

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ground information.222 He is annoyed with himself when he feels that he did not structure his narrative satisfactorily. In chapter 106, Ahab moves incautiously so that his leg needs to be replaced. Ishmael explains that this has happened before. Just before the Pequod was about to leave Nantucket, Ahab’s ivory leg had been so unfortunately displaced that it had pierced his groin: “Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way, have been disclosed before.”223 Ishmael thinks that he should have explained earlier why Ahab remains in his cabin for such a long time at the beginning of the journey. To Ishmael, proper narration “in set way” means that there is some logic to the narrative sequence, that one topic naturally follows from the previous one. Or, in Ishmael’s words, a book should look like a tree: “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.”224 If Ahab’s first appearance initiates the branch Ahab, the twig that explains this late appearance should soon grow to complete this branch. The late explanation seems to violate the organic and hierarchal way Ishmael wants to arrange his narrative. He attempts to write what Deleuze and Guattari call a tree- or root-book. The root-book is “the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority”.225 According to Deleuze and Guattari, the root-book is an imitation of the world (because art is an imitation of nature). The basic idea is that of division and binary logic: one becomes two. Ishmael tries to imitate nature by giving an accurate representation of the whale. He looks for imitation in the paintings, but he also departs from imitation and representation. Ishmael may desire order and he may envisage his book as a tree-like structure, but at the same time the book is growing wildly in all directions. It may not be a complete rhizome-book yet, but it has elements of multiplicity and heterogeneity (multiple focalizations, ambiguities, genre mixture, intertextuality) and Ishmael’s own movement through the book is rhizome-like. He seems to form a bulb of subjectivity and then move on in a different direction. Ishmael is aware of the proliferation of his own book. His inability to find a good order for, or a final version of, the book is a result of the text running riot. When Ishmael tries to classify whales, he invents a very odd system that he knows is incomplete: “Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities. […] I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that reason infallibly be faulty.”226 The metaphors employed designate Moby-Dick as smooth space without boundaries. Interestingly, the system of classification Ishmael uses for the whale is that

222

See ibid., 448. Ibid., 464. 224 Ibid., 289. 225 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5. 226 Melville, Moby-Dick, 134, 36. 223

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of different book formats. The hieroglyphic whale has become a book.227 The book is not finished nor is closure a worthy goal. At the end of the cetology chapter Ishmael elaborates, “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”228 Moby-Dick is neither complete nor ordered as admitted by Ishmael, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method”.229 The root-book is only one side of Ishmael’s poetics, the other side is the approximation of the rhizomebook. Ishmael is caught between two different poetic programs, one resembling a root- the other a rhizome-book. His careful disorderliness pays tribute to both order and meaning and to chaos and nonsense. The desire for interpretation and the impossibility of interpretation alternate in Moby-Dick. The oscillation between these two principles is mirrored in Ishmael’s oscillation between subjectivity and dissolution and his desire for open smooth space versus navigational certainty. Ishmael makes Moby-Dick the epitome of Romantic a-limitation: the text and its narrator are in a state of change and becoming. As a result of this oscillation the novel itself tends towards the rhizome-book and is thus slightly more modern than its own semiotic and poetic programs. Ishmael remains in this state of becoming because his method is that of careful disorderliness. Ahab, on the contrary, is pure transgression. Not only does he throw his quadrant away and build his own compass, not only is he an assemblage made out of transgressive intertexts, not only does he desire dissolution, but Ahab also pursues the whale to the very end. He has to die because he lifts the veil of the goddess by becoming one with the whale. The divine whale, the divine truth, and its deciphering are his end. Ahab, Anselmus, and Melmoth all possess secrets, but they cannot be communicated. The secrets disappear into undiscovered countries. Anselmus is in Atlantis and Ahab has launched “into the region of the strange Untried; […] the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored”,230 which is Ishmael’s description of death. Their counterparts, Ishmael, the narrator, and John Melmoth, do not follow them across the last great boundary. Other texts do not even provide main characters that complete alimitation. In Das Marmorbild only a dark knight remains behind in the world of living statues; the main protagonists all choose the safer world.

227

Dryden points out that Ishmael’s turning the whale into a book corresponds with the organization of his own bookish world. In this regard, the cetological system and also Moby-Dick in its entirety refer only to themselves. Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form, 94. Self-reflectiveness is, as I have also discussed, an important trait of Romantic literature and of Moby-Dick, but it is not its only defining characteristic. If that were the case, Moby-Dick would be situated at the extreme pole of deferred meaning. 228 Melville, Moby-Dick, 145. 229 Ibid., 361. 230 Ibid., 486.

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Melmoth, Der goldne Topf, and Moby-Dick are divided between subjects who are engaged in a-limitation and those who carry it to the extreme. Only they can know what this extreme feels like. The survivors (Ishmael, John, and the narrator) can communicate only an approximation of the truth. Ishmael resurfaces as a self for the last time when the novel ends. He has survived by clinging to the life buoy made from the coffin that Queequeg requested when he fell ill. It is some coffin! Not only does it save a life instead of burying the dead, but it also has the entire art of truth inscribed on it because Queequeg transcribed his own body-marks onto the wooden casket. Ishmael resurfaces clinging to the indecipherable sign. The narrator of Der goldne Topf keeps a similar souvenir: his vision of Anselmus on the Archivarius’s parchment. The narrator wishes that he could have completed his transgression. In an attempt to comfort him, the Archivarius says that “das Leben in der Poesie”231 (life in poetry) is nothing but this final boundary crossing – life in Atlantis. Thus, the text itself offers the experience of alimitation to the reader. The literary texts discussed in this chapter fulfil this Romantic ideal by not only crossing subject and spatial boundaries, but by semiotically realizing these a-limitations.

231

Hoffmann, Der goldne Topf, 102.

4. Theory Plateau on Semiotic A-limitation

Single signs: Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” This chapter is an afterthought (or a theoretical echo) to the preceding analysis of Moby-Dick, Das Marmorbild, Melmoth, and Der goldne Topf. The semiotic tension between the pole of the natural sign/meaning/original language/magic sign and the pole of the arbitrary sign/language systems/language games/constant deferral of meaning (see chapter 2) is expressed on different levels of the literary texts. As the analysis of Moby-Dick shows, the semiotics in a text can correspond to the semiotics of the text. Signs (tattoos, hieroglyphics, paintings, engravings, etc.) play an important role in the novel, but the semiotic structure of the text itself also proposes a semiotic agenda. Since Moby-Dick is a prototypical text of Romantic semiotic a-limitation, it offers a plethora of entry points and ways of looking at semiotic a-limitation: signs in the text, intertextuality, ekphrasis, possible worlds, embedded narratives, schizonarration, and the tension between the root- and the rhizome-book. Comparing Moby-Dick to other Romantic texts shows that these entry points are not specific to Moby-Dick, but can also be used to access semiotic a-limitation phenomena in other texts. In this chapter I would like to provide a map for the analysis of semiotic a-limitation by pointing to the different levels of the text from which I accessed Moby-Dick and the other texts in the previous chapter, but also by suggesting additional approaches to the phenomenon. A-limitation functions as a triad of sign, subject, and space. In most cases, one of the dimensions is foregrounded. Joseph von Eichendorff’s famous poem “Mondnacht” can serve to illustrate how semiotic a-limitation sometimes recedes into the background, while spatial and subject a-limitation dominate the scene. I propose to use “Mondnacht” as a counter example to the strong case of semiotic a-limitation in Moby-Dick to illustrate that there are more possibilities of understanding semiotic a-limitation, even when it is subordinated to spatial and subject a-limitation (which are discussed in the context of “Mondnacht” in the other “theoretical plateaus”). “Mondnacht” opens with a specific instance of boundary crossing: earth and sky kiss in the first stanza,

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Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel Die Erde still geküßt, Daß sie im Blüten-Schimmer Von ihm nun träumen müßt’.1 (It was as if the sky Had silently kissed the earth so that in the glimmering blossoms she would now have to dream of him.)

The second stanza describes a landscape, and in the third stanza the speaker says that his soul spread its wings and flew through the silent countryside as if it was flying home (“Flog durch die stillen Lande, / Als flöge sie nach Haus”). At first glance, the Eichendorff poem seems fairly conventional. It fulfils its rhyme scheme and therefore adheres to the code of poetic language. The poem can be understood superficially at a first reading. But there are different modes of semiotic a-limitation, different ways of introducing disorder into the system. In Eichendorff’s poem, intertextuality (in the form of the Gaia myth) adds to the meaning, and the switching back and forth between indicative and subjunctive verb forms could be seen as an experiment with conventionality. The poem opens with the words “Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel” indicating that the sky did not actually kiss the earth, but that this was rather the visualization of a feeling. The problem is that, at first, there is no one who feels this feeling. The lyrical I is absent until the last stanza, but then it leaves its body to fly off again. The second stanza is written in the indicative. The third stanza is a mixture of both. The soul really spreads its wings and really flies. But it flies as if it were flying home. The reader has to decide what to make of the occurrence: how much is metaphorical and how much is part of a fantastic world? The sign level of a-limitation is relatively low in comparison to other Romantic or even Modernist (for example Finnegan’s Wake) and Postmodernist works. The narrator of the poem is slightly ambiguous and, by playing around with the grammatical modes, introduces this ambiguity into the language system. While “Mondnacht” needs to be read carefully, other poems bear the potential for semiotic a-limitation in their genre description: hybrid poems such as elegiac sonnets (Charlotte Smith) or lyrical ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) suggest a synthesis and mixture of conventions. Other Romantic genres such as the dramatic texts which are impossible to stage and thus defy their genre conventions (for example plays by Brentano or the closet drama in England) or the idea of Universalpoesie that integrates poems, songs, and fairy tales into the novel (for example Heinrich von Ofterdingen) show how high the potential to cross the borders of conventional signification is. In the fragment, the tension between infinite deferral (the openness of the text itself) and meaning (a fragment can also be interpreted) is also exemplified. 1

Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006) 322f.

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Intertextuality Between the specific example of the subjunctive in Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht” and the general question of hybrid or particularly open genres lie several options of scrutinizing a text for semiotic a-limitation phenomena. The text itself has several different crossable interior boundaries. Concepts such as ‘intertextuality’ bear the crossing of textual boundaries in their name: a transgression between texts, or one text invading the space of the other. I would like to begin the discussion of access points to a-limitation with intertextuality for several reasons. Intertextuality is one of the main indicators of semiotic a-limitation because it means that texts merge. The second reason is that the theory of intertextuality is confronted with the same problem as the theory of a-limitation: the question of whether intertextuality (or a-limitation) is not merely something that is true for all texts and is thus insufficient as an analytic tool. I would like to move from the poststructuralist notion of intertextuality to a narrower and more applicable theory whose functionality I will transfer to the notion of a-limitation, while at the same time using it to identify semiotic phenomena of a-limitation. Julia Kristeva developed the first theoretical concept of intertextuality as part of the poststructuralist theorists’ attempts to “disrupt notions of stable meaning and objective interpretation”.2 Kristeva’s construction of intertextuality is an ontological and a universal one.3 Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, Kristeva argues that every text is governed by intertextuality in two ways. First of all, a text is always an intertext of other texts; it refers, alludes, and builds on preceding texts and is part of other texts. Second, this idea of regressus ad infinitum is expanded to the author and the reader. They are created by texts and vanish into texts as well.4 The poststructuralist universe is comprised only of texts or signifiers that point to other signifiers.5 The idea of endless chains of texts (or signifiers) corresponds with the Postmodernist disposition and with Postmodernist literature. In a world where the search for truth or meaning has become obsolete and useless, there is no choice but to turn to empty lan2

3

4 5

Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000) 3. Allen provides a basic introduction that does not develop its own theory nor attempts to define the concept of intertextuality. He traces it historically from the groundwork laid by de Saussure to Bakhtin and Kristeva, Barthes, Genette, and Bloom. My brief introduction to intertextuality and the way it is applied in this study draws on Manfred Pfister’s description and specification of the concept. See Manfred Pfister, “Konzepte der Intertextualität,” Intertextualität. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, eds. Manfred Pfister and Ulrich Broich (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1985) 1–30, Manfred Pfister, “How Postmodern is Intertextuality?” Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1991) 207–224. See Kristeva’s essay “Word, Dialogue and Novel” republished in Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 34–61. See Pfister, “Konzepte der Intertextualität,” 11.

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guage fragments and rearrange them in a playful way. The radical ontological notion is a result of Postmodernist and poststructuralist theory and can best be observed in Postmodernist texts. To follow Kristeva’s claim that intertextuality is constituent of all (literary) texts, however, suggests that intertextuality can mean almost anything from the interaction of entire texts to the interaction of structural elements, words, syntax, or genre characteristics. Each text contains traces of other texts turning the universe into one general (inter)text.6 The same problem arises with a-limitation. Chapter 1 (on boundaries) shows that many theoretical assumptions used to describe the transgression of semiotic and subject boundaries deal with questions of poeticism or literariness.7 Deleuze and Guattari’s implied concept of a-limitation even comprises an entire epistemological model, a way of seeing the world. A-limitation thus seems to be a very basic characteristic of texts and of philosophy. However, neither of the theories claims absolute universality. Even Kristeva, who propagates the ontological version of intertextuality or transgression, makes some references to specific texts or periods. This means that a-limitation can be understood as an ontological or a descriptive phenomenon in the same way that intertextuality can be understood as a universal quality of all texts or a trait of specific kinds of texts. Every fictional text departs from conventional language as every text stands in some relation to other texts in the same way that every text features aspects of semiotic alimitation. In the Eichendorff poem, the intertextual aspect is only hinted at in the union of earth and sky, which could point to the myth of Gaia and Uranus.8 The intertextual relations in Das Marmorbild are more intense: the protagonists and the narrator allude to Greek myths and the Venus mountain. In Moby-Dick there are even stronger intertexts, for example the quotations from various Shakespeare plays, but also Ahab’s different persona (Lear, Faust, Prometheus). Ishmael sometimes quotes specific texts, but he also makes use of intertexts which have become topoi through frequent use, such as the devilish attributes of Ahab. In other places Ishmael adopts Shakespearean diction (which is sometimes called system reference). Listing these intertextual references and topoi shows their quantity, but there is also a qualitative difference between them. Manfred Pfister develops a catalogue for the differentiation between various kinds and grades of intertextuality. He develops a taxonomy for intertextuality that reconciles poststructuralist ontological theories with structuralist and hermeneutic notions. He 6 7

8

Ibid., 12f. Lotman understands the crossing of borders as a prerequisite for literature with plot. Eco develops the “open work” based on the constitutive openness of all texts. Schwab draws on theories that try to explain the cognitive processes of reading, and Derrida and Peirce consider the notion of unlimited semiosis true for all language. See Wolfgang Frühwald, “Die Erneuerung des Mythos. Zu Eichendorffs Gedicht ‘Mondnacht’,” Gedichte und Interpretationen. Klassik und Romantik, ed. Wulf Segebrecht (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001) 399f.

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scales intertextuality according to the intensity of six qualitative criteria: referentiality (How does the text refer to the intertext?), communication (How directly is the intertext communicated?), auto-reflexivity (Is the intertext reflected upon?), structural integration (Is the intertext just quoted or does it affect the text structurally?), selectivity (What aspects of the intertext are used: quotation, allusion, etc.?), and dialogicity (Is there a tension between text and intertext?). Pfister suggests imagining intertextuality as a system of concentric circles, whose centre marks the highest intensity. The further we move towards the margin, the weaker the intensity and density of intertextuality become.9 T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land sits at the centre of Pfister’s intertextuality diagram because its intertextuality is intended, marked, reflected upon, expanded to include the structure of the text, and it confronts different value systems with each other. I would like to adopt some aspects of this scale of intertextuality to the specific issue of semiotic a-limitation in order to make semiotic a-limitation in the form of intertextuality visible and comparable. This form of scaling is also useful for the other a-limitation phenomena (for example ekphrasis). While some criteria may serve to classify intertextuality in its pre-Modernist, Modernist, or Postmodernist forms, some are particularly useful for determining intertextuality as a-limitation. In Postmodernist texts Pfister claims, “intertextuality is not just used as one device amongst others, but is foregrounded, displayed, thematized and theorized as a central constructional principle”.10 In Romantic texts, this is not yet the case. But, intertextuality can be reflexive in Romantic texts as well. Reflexivity poses the question of how intentional and how marked an intertextual element is, and how much it is thematized and reflected upon in the text. If a text is a highly reflexive intertext, this implies an awareness of its paradigmatic integration and its nature as a signifier within a general text. The borders of the text are intentionally crossed. While the allusion to Greek myth in “Mondnacht” is not strongly marked in the poem, the intertextual personalities that Ahab is possessed by are explicitly named. Yet, Ishmael does not make explicit the fact that Ahab resembles King Lear. This means that semiotic a-limitation in the form of intertextuality has the potential to become more intense in Postmodernist texts. While the intensity and reflexivity of the intertextual boundary crossing affects the level of semiotic a-limitation and also provides a criterion for distinguishing between Romantic and Postmodernist texts, the content of the pre-text is also of relevance. In Pfister’s model, intertextuality is particularly strong when there is a confrontation between text and intertext. Semiotic a-limitation is particularly strong when the pre-text already deals with a-limitation phenomena. The encounter between Gaia and Uranus, for example, is erotic and of great consequences: Gaia is one of the first gods. Thus the poem extends into the realm of the origin of the world and the gods. Similar instances 9 10

Pfister, “Konzepte der Intertextualität,” 25. Pfister, “How Postmodern is Intertextuality?” 214.

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of a-limitation pre-texts are, for example, the Faustian transgressors in Moby-Dick and Melmoth. The allusion to a transgressive pre-text amplifies the strength of a-limitation in the text itself. In sum, the refinement of intertextuality as a phenomenon of a-limitation raises three analytical questions: How strong is the intertextuality, particularly in its effect on coherent meaning? How reflexive is it? Are the pre-texts a-limitation texts?

Ekphrasis as intermedial phenomenon If the diagrammatic icon of intertextuality is extended to be a part of the rhizome of semiotic a-limitation, it is no longer just a structure of concentric circles, but one bulb or one fibre or one access point on the map to semiotic a-limitation. Following this line of thought leads to the notion of intermediality,11 interart studies, or intermedia studies. In Kristeva’s sense of the concepts there is no difference between written texts and other media.12 Intertextuality considered in a narrow sense deals with texts comprised of verbal sign systems that are juxtaposed with other verbal sign systems: a case of intramediality rather than intermediality. If other semiotic systems operating with (audio)visual signs are involved, the term intermediality seems more adequate. In this sense, intermediality is a phenomenon that transgresses media boundaries and involves at least two conventionally distinct media.13 Romanticism offers different intermedial phenomena: media combinations, in which two distinct media are materially present and combined with each other as is the case in Blake’s illuminated books, and intermedia references, when there is just one medium materially present and the other is only referred to. The second kind of intermediality is particularly interesting for semiotic analysis because the communicative interaction between two media constitutes meaning differently from the meaning generation of a single medium. The original medium can either refer to an isolated medium or to an entirely different semiotic system. With a-limitation in mind, the nature of the contact between two media is interesting: Is meaning transgressed, established, or affirmed? How strong is the intermedial contact? Do two semiotic systems or just two signs interfere? Other genres such as film or hypertext offer even more possibilities to look at the crossing of media boundaries. 11

12 13

The term intermediality is used in Germany in order to accentuate its new theoretical orientation compared to the older interart studies. It includes all media and is not limited to the finer arts. See Irina O. Rajewsky, Intermedialität (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2002) 9ff. Rajewsky’s book serves as the basis for the following explanations of intermediality. The complex debate on intertextuality and intermediality is of no concern here. For an overview of this debate see chapters 3.3.2 to 4.4 in ibid., 43–77. Ibid., 13.

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The previous chapter on Moby-Dick, Marmorbild, and Melmoth focuses on one particular case of intermediality that underwent interesting changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ekphrasis. Since the meaning of ekphrasis changed because of a heightened awareness of the different arts and the growing autonomy of art in general in the eighteenth century (as Lessing’s “Laokoon” shows),14 ekphrasis is a particularly interesting topic in Romanticism. The beginning of the differentiation of the arts coincided with a paradigm shift from the mimetic representation of the world to its aesthetic presentation.15 The semiotics of Romanticism, understood as a conflict between meaning and self-reflexivity, is part of this shift. Expressions of this tension differ: competing worlds (fantasy/reality) or notation systems or, as in the case of ekphrasis, a confrontation between different media. These expressions of the semiotics of Romanticism mark a central epistemological problem. The question they raise is how Romantic writers saw and used the semiotic potential of pictures and how they made use of the 2000-year-old rhetorical discipline of ekphrasis.16 Broadly speaking ekphrasis means “the verbal representation of visual representation”.17 First of all, it is a transgression of semiotic boundaries. One medium is translated into another. There is a promise of naturalness and motivation in the iconic sign, of a clarity that surpasses the arbitrary sign.18 Peirce writes of the icon, “the only way of directly communicating an idea is by means of an icon”.19 In ekphrasis, as the combination of the iconic sign and the symbol, language becomes a substitute for the natural sign that lies beyond the ability of arbitrary signs.20

14

15 16

17

18 19

20

See the introduction to Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer, eds., Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Unveränd. Nachdr. der 1. Aufl. (München: Fink, 1995) 9. See ibid., 9. For an introduction to the concept and its problems see Gottfried Boehm, “Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache,” Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer (München: Fink, 1995) 23. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 151. The definition is derived from James A.W. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation,” New Literary History 22.2 (1991): 299. The rhetorical term for this promise is enargeia. Ekphrasis as enargeia should bring reader and object closer together by making the reader see the object. See Boehm, “Bildbeschreibung,” 35. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 2. Elements of Logic, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1960) 158. (CP 2.278) “Wenn Sprache letztlich dieserart als Ersatz für das natürliche Zeichen fungiert, versucht sie darzustellen, was eigentlich jenseits der Darstellungskraft von Wörtern als arbiträre Zeichen zu liegen scheint.” Murray Krieger, “Das Problem der Ekphrasis. Wort und Bild, Raum und Zeit – und das literarische Kunstwerk,” Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer (München: Fink, 1995) 43.

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Second, ekphrasis is a spatial transgression because it combines the spatial medium of visual art with the temporal medium of literature, it promises the impossible aesthetic merging of space and time.21 Ekphrastic descriptions are the prototypical confluence of space and time, but they can also generate frustration: both the desire for an unmediated spatial experience and the desire for temporal flux are disappointed.22 By coupling the promise of possibilities or ideal notions with this disappointment, ekphrasis becomes a very Romantic semiotic experience. Its origins lie in the search for the natural sign.23 Just like the diagrammatical sign, the diagrammatical way of reasoning (see chapter 2) or the metaphor, ekphrasis embodies this tension between hope and its frustration.24 In Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, for example, these tensions, desires, and disappointments are negotiated through the description of an urn, a spatial object that arrests time (in positive and negative ways) and yet resists the straightforward meaning promised by the visual sign. Third, the definition supports the second quality of iconicity: indirect representation. A picture is a thing, but it is also a sign. Description always seems incomplete and inaccurate.25 A representation of a representation is by definition separated from the signified. At least two signifiers stand in the reader’s way before he can arrive at meaning. In this sense, ekphrasis is a strategy for the deferral of meaning. Sometimes ekphrasis is also considered to be a kind of interpretation which would remove the reader even further from the original signified.26 As soon as a visual image is turned into a narrative, it changes. The immediate narration of visual reality is impossible. Some qualities of the image are always omitted and others are added. Merely describing the details in a picture does not suffice as a description of the picture because its structure and effect have

21

22 23 24

25 26

This idea depends upon Lessing’s essay on Laokoon and ekphrasis. The assignment of space to visual arts and time to literature has been long since overhauled. This study naturally works with literary space. Nevertheless, the concept of ekphrasis serves to make a certain kind of literary space more visible. See Mitchell, Picture Theory, 151–82. Also see Krieger, “Das Problem der Ekphrasis,” 41–58. See Krieger, “Das Problem der Ekphrasis,” 43. See ibid., 44. I will not discuss metaphor in this context, but the system of ekphrasis as a-limitation can be transferred to metaphors of a-limitation. What is the frequency or density of metaphorical signs in a text? A high frequency of metaphors suggests a high level of the deferral of meaning, but is still very close to the ontological definition of a-limitation. Are we dealing with a metaphor of a-limitation, or is one of its components an a-limitations concept? Finally, does the metaphor add or confuse meaning? Are there different interpretative possibilities? How consistent or probable is the occurrence of the metaphor in the given context, i.e. how far is the metaphor removed from the prototypical usage of a word? See Boehm, “Bildbeschreibung,” 25. See Peter Wagner, “Introduction. Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality,” Icons – Texts – Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1996) 1-42.

Narrative I: possible worlds

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to be included as well.27 To sum up, ekphrasis could be said to be always less and more than the original visual sign.28 As the analysis of a-limitation in texts has nothing to do with Einflussforschung (the reconstruction of influences and sources), it is not important whether a poetic description is based on an existing painting or sculpture. Instead, the question is how and why pictures are described: Do they contribute to meaning, or does ekphrasis serve as a means of deferral? Are the pictures thought to be more natural, mimetic, or true, or is their supposed superiority over the spoken word deconstructed? Are visual signs seen as a solution to a crisis of verbal representation, or are they part of a semiotic dilemma? And, last but not least, there is the question of whether the visual images themselves delineate scenarios of a-limitation. Eichendorff’s statue of Venus is just such a transgressive iconic sign signifying erotic pleasure and the danger of seduction. It also seems to fulfil the promise of an unmediated relation to the object, a promise that is inverted to a frightening experience: the becoming-sign of the subject. The statue (object) does not only come to life for the reader through its description (verbal sign), but it also comes to life for the spectator in the text. Equally uncanny is the living painting of Melmoth in Melmoth the Wanderer. Ekphrasis as enargeia is taken to the extreme in these texts. In Moby-Dick, on the other hand, the painting of the whale leads to a rather desperate ekphrasis: a polyvocal interpretation of an enigmatic icon which demonstrates not only that ekphrasis relies on arbitrary signs, but also that the iconic sign itself is not as natural as might be hoped for in the search for truth.

Narrative I: possible worlds Ekphrasis in verbal texts is still a narrative. Thus it is positioned on the level of the text as an intermedial phenomenon, but it is also part of the diegesis. Someone is describing the painting or sculpture to the reader. In the analytic chapter, both discourse and story are crucial elements in the description and explanation of semiotic a-limitation phenomena because semiotic a-limitation can take place on all levels of the text: from its interaction with an intertext to different kinds of discourse on several levels (embedded narratives) and from several points of view (offering competing possible worlds to the reader) to the story level and finally to single signs (metaphors or for example the subjunctive in Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht”). For this reason, narrative deserves to receive detailed attention in the construction and analysis of a-limitation. Understanding the ways a narrative transgresses boundaries 27 28

See Boehm, “Bildbeschreibung,” 30. I am indebted to Elisabeth Bronfen’s lecture on “Visuality and Textuality – An uncanny encounter” (Berlin 2009) for these insights.

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in Romantic literature is one of the keys to understanding the semiosis of a-limitation. In chapter 3 I use several methods to render a-limitation visible that I would like to explain briefly in the following passages. The analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf makes use of the possible worlds theory to shed light on the competing ideas in the text. The possible worlds theory was adapted from philosophy to the study of literature by Marie-Laure Ryan and Ruth Ronen in order to look at two different problems: fictionality and plot organization.29 The great advantage of this theory is its spatial implication: stories are understood as a system of many different worlds that relate to each other. The idea is based on Leibniz and Kripke’s elaboration of Leibniz’s theory. An infinity of worlds exists, but only one of them is actual. All other worlds are possible and are created by the minds of people, and they could potentially become actual. Every person strives to move his or her possible worlds and the actual world closer together (to realize his or her thoughts). While literary texts could be considered possible worlds in relation to the actual (real) world, each fictional text is an actual world itself (a textual actual world) that includes the subworlds (textual possible worlds) of its characters (and its narrator(s)). These subworlds determine the actions of characters and influence reader reception by creating expectations. Ryan and Ronen use the different subworlds to develop highly complex plot structures that are visualized in even more complex diagrams. Instead of attempting a complete plot analysis, I would like to suggest the following: the quality of the characters’ textual possible worlds and their relation to the textual actual world could be indicators of a-limitation. Ryan lists different types of worlds (for example knowledge, obligation, and wish worlds), which relate differently to the actual world.30 In the knowledge world, for example, the operators are knowledge, belief, and ignorance. A popular example is Oedipus whose actions are determined by his textual possible world where he is ignorant of the fact that he marries his mother and kills his father. His knowledge world changes to knowledge when his crimes are revealed. Characters in fictional texts can belong to different possible worlds and these worlds can contradict each other. One of the worlds listed by Ryan is different from all others: the fantasy-world. While the other worlds are subworlds, the fantasy-world is a whole universe that characters reach through re-centering. Fantasy-worlds are dreams, fantasies, and fictional stories told by characters. Each of these universes can have different subworlds: a dream within a dream, a story within a story, or the subworlds of characters. To enter a fantasy-world is “like crashing through a wall”.31 According to Ryan, the character’s 29

30 31

See Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See chapters 6 and 7 in Ryan, Possible Worlds. Ibid., 119.

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goal is to make the textual actual world coincide with as many textual possible worlds as possible, except for the fantasy-universes. From this she derives different plottypologies.32 When looking for a-limitation, the first consideration is the quality of the textual possible worlds: can these worlds be characterized by a-limitation? Possible examples are transgressive worlds that negate a transcendental signified, and wish-worlds in which transcendence or death are considered desirable. Locating these a-limitation subworlds would indicate a-limitation in its most basic form. Anselmus’s fantasy world is an example of a possible world of a-limitation because it is a world where the magic sign exists. Charlotte Smith’s poems discussed in chapter 7 are another example because they stage worlds of death and dissolution against a bleak reality. The second way of looking at a-limitation in terms of possible worlds is to determine the relationship between the fantasy-universe und the textual actual world. According to Ryan, these worlds are separated by a thick wall, to transgress this border is consequently an a-limitation phenomenon. If the relation between fantasy-universes and the textual actual world is unstable, this could be an indicator of a-limitation.33 This is exactly what happens in Der goldne Topf as Anselmus continually moves from one world to the other. I would like to suggest that the theory of possible worlds is not restricted to narrative texts. Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” also contains different possible worlds. The grammatical analysis has revealed a semiotic uncertainty about the nature of the a-limitation experience. If the poem presents a fantasy-universe and the mystical encounters are just fantasy, it is certainly an a-limitation fantasy. The mixing of indicative and subjunctive, however, creates a confluence of the textual actual world and the fantasy-universe. Consequently, a-limitation occurs at a semiotic level as well. The final and most extreme plot a-limitation phenomenon takes place when the reader has difficulty determining the textual actual world. At this point, the discourse level 32

33

The question remains why a character would not want to realize his fantasy world. A possible answer inferred from Ryan is that fantasy-worlds can fulfil the metaphorical function of knowledge or wish worlds. The character realizes their fantasy universe through the recursion of the knowledge or wish world. I would question that there is more than a thin line between fantasy and wish worlds. If we presuppose this line, however, the fantasy universe becomes increasingly interesting in the context of a-limitation. Martinez and Scheffel develop a similar idea. There are homogenous and heterogeneous worlds (other rules of probability are at work), uni-regional and pluri-regional worlds (different systems are narrated alongside one another, for example through intradiegesis), and stable and unstable worlds (it remains unclear whether the fantastic is real or not). The world in Kafka’s Die Verwandlung is heterogeneous because in the actual world it is not possible to suddenly turn into a large insect. It is, however, a uni-regional and stable world because the transformation is accepted as probable by all characters and there are no intradiegetic worlds that suggest otherwise. By combining Ryan and Martinez, a-limitation could be defined as a confluence of textual actual world and fantasy universe into a pluri-regional and unstable textual world. See Matias Martinez and Michael Scheffel, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie, 7th ed. (München: Beck, 2007) 123–34.

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has to be included in the consideration of the different worlds. Who is the creator of the textual actual world? If there is an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrator with zero or external focalization who is omniscient and omnipresent, it can be assumed that this narrator is the master of the textual actual world. What happens if the reader sees the world through the eyes of an internal focalizer? Who says that the reader is seeing the textual actual world and not the focalizer’s subworld? What if the narrator is a homodiegetic first person narrator? Does the narrator then represent the textual actual world or is the textual actual world actually one of the other characters’ textual possible worlds? The epistemological consequence of uncertain textual actual worlds is that of uncertain truth. To deprive the reader of certainty concerning the status of the worlds in a text is to keep meaning from them. In the reader’s journey from one textual possible world to the other in search of the textual actual world, meaning is deferred. If the reader cannot trust the narrator anymore, the final authority of fictional truth is shattered. This happens in both Moby-Dick and Der goldne Topf, though to different degrees. The narrator’s position in the different possible worlds is crucial for semiotic a-limitation.

Narrative II: the discourse level Both Ishmael and the narrator of Der goldne Topf shift between worlds: sometimes they are in the world of the story, sometimes they remain on the discourse level. They often leave the reader in the dark concerning their opinion of the textual actual world. In this context, I would like to point out that the metalepsis of these narrators can also be considered an a-limitation phenomenon. Their unreliability does not play a large part in the analysis, but it could also be considered an a-limitation phenomenon on the level of discourse.34 If the narrator’s position in the communicative model changes from heterodiegetic to homodiegetic (or the other way around), or if the narrative situation (from first person to third person) or the mode (showing versus telling) change, the narrator becomes elusive to the reader. A similar way of refusing unambiguous information is a change of focalization (alteration). If the reader sees the story through the eyes of different people, different textual possible worlds can be witnessed. Reconstructing the textual actual world is then left to the reader and might prove impossible. Sometimes it is difficult even to determine the focalizer. The sudden change between different modes of fo-

34

On the connection between possible worlds theory and unreliability see Jose Antonio Al Amoros, “Possible-World Semantics, Frame Text, Insert Text, and Unreliable Narration. The Case of The Turn,” Style 25.1 (1991) 42–70. On unreliability also see Bruno Zerweck, “Historicizing Unreliable Narration. Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” Style 35.1 (2001) 151–178.

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calization can also pose a problem for the reader. If a text starts in the mode of internal focalization, but switches to external focalization, Genette speaks of ‘paralepsis’. The leaping between modes, the entering and exiting of character-brains, is a border crossing that reader and narrator undertake together. The switches in Moby-Dick are extremely rapid examples brought about by a desire for subject a-limitation. The awareness of the narrative process that is reflected upon through embedded stories adds to this schizonarration. Embedded stories add borders to a text that can be crossed. The more intradiegetic stories there are, the further away the final signified is removed. To use a popular image: the content of the Chinese box can only be reached after opening all of the preceding boxes. An accumulation of intradiegetic stories could be understood in a similar way as changing focalization (the two phenomena might even coincide): many voices are needed to communicate a signified. Each voice, each discourse, is the signifier to a signified that turns out to be yet another discourse or signifier. The final story is sometimes deeply hidden. Melmoth the Wanderer demonstrates this search for meaning as the (almost) infinite crossing of story boundaries. There are other ways of challenging the reader by creating semiotic a-limitation: an a-chronological mode of narration (as in Blake’s Jerusalem), repetition (also Jerusalem), and unreliability35 (Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”) are possibilities explored in other chapters. Eventually, these means become visible only through their subversion of narratological models such as the ones developed by Genette. As O’Neill’s Postmodernist critique of narratology shows, none of the categories developed by Genette or others is clear-cut. A narrative, “by its nature, always contains the seeds of its own subversion”.36 All narrative discourse is compound discourse, meaning that there are always multiple voices relating a story. A story is always embedded, focalizers always distort the true story, and time is never chronological. While this Postmodernist deconstruction of the narrative and narratology may be true in its essence, the question of degree and quality remains unanswered. How subversive is a text, how many transgressions are in it? Are these transgressions part of an aesthetic and epistemic system? It is important to differentiate between various degrees. It is true that no literary text can be forced into a narratological model. The question is how resistant a text is. Some Postmodernist texts are resistant to the highest possible degree. They even render it impossible to talk of unreliability as the underlying thought because they suggest that there is no ontological truth.

35

36

I do not discuss unreliability in detail. For an introduction consult Ansgar Nünning, “Unreliable Narration zur Einführung. Grundzüge einer kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens,” Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, ed. Ansgar Nünning (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998). See Patrick O’Neill, Fictions of Discourse. Reading Narrative Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

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To sum up, there are multiple ways of looking at a-limitation with narratological methods: on the story level and on the discourse level. On both levels there are three indicators that point to three different kinds and intensities of a-limitation. On the story level, an a-limitation textual possible world is superseded by unstable worlds that include fantasy-universes. The highest quality of a-limitation is reached when the textual actual world cannot be determined. On the discourse level low a-limitation takes place when there are inconsistencies in the categories such as mode, order, or time. Embedded tales and metalepsis (or also unreliability) suggest a more intense kind of a-limitation. From the subjunctive in Eichendorff’s poem to various narratological phenomena on story and discourse levels and the relation between different texts and media, this section offers multiple ways of looking at a-limitation. Some possibilities are not discussed in detail because they are not part of the textual analysis in chapter 3, but they could also be pursued (for example metaphor or the relation between painting and text). The plethora of possibilities shows that semiotic a-limitation is Romantic because it is based on the tension between different semiotics, but also that it is a universal (and in its lowest degree ontological) phenomenon in literature of all periods. A-limitation is a matter of degree. Certain semiotic a-limitation phenomena such as self-reflexive intertextuality or metalepsis are more prominent in Postmodernism. All of them need to be considered in conjunction with subject and spatial a-limitation. In this respect, this section is only a very small plateau, or a snapshot of a-limitation from a semiotic perspective.

5. Subject Boundaries

Becoming-sign: the effects of liminal semiotics on the subject “Ein Gedicht muß ganz unerschöpflich seyn, wie ein Mensch”1 (A poem has to be inexhaustible, just like a human being) writes Novalis in his fragments. The analysis of books such as Moby-Dick (see chapter 3) shows how inexhaustible a sign or a text can be and how a narrator can experience difficulties controlling such a text. Ishmael’s oscillation between the desire for interpretation and the denial of meaning, between the desire to dissolve as a subject and his constant re-emergence as a subject, his oscillation between the desire to write a root-book and the rhizomatic proliferation of a text that seems out of control – all these oscillations are the effects of a semiotic tension between two kinds of sign models. One sign model understands the sign as an entity that can be understood once its code has been discovered. This kind of sign has a transcendent signified transmitted through signifiers. The other model sees language as an autonomous entity that is self-reflexive, arbitrary, and fortified against users who try to understand its mechanisms and attempt to decipher its codes. Caught between signification and unlimited semiosis, Romantic semiotics creates texts and textual subjects that mirror this tension. As chapter 3 shows, Ishmael is only one of these subjects. This chapter explores the Romantic subject, a subject that is as inexhaustible as the Romantic sign, as the embodiment of semiotic tension in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and William Blake’s Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion. All three texts, though written in different countries and at different times, portray subjects in a way that corresponds with Romantic liminal semiotics. The Romantic subject is, like the Romantic sign, generated by two distinct ideas of the subject. On the one hand, the subject as individual is invented and celebrated in the Romantic period. On the other hand, the subject is de- and reterritorial-

1

Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 2. Das philosophischtheoretische Werk., ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 826.

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ized.2 Affirmative and expressive selves are at the center of Romantic texts. They say ‘I’ with pride and relate their feelings and their thoughts in great detail. At the same time, the desire to be liberated from this constraining subjectivity, to become more than just an ‘I’, leads to processes of a-limitation. The subject approaches his or her own limit and explores the possibilities of other modes of being by becoming something else. Ahab becomes whale; Anselmus becomes the husband of a golden snake; Melmoth becomes an agent of the devil. To go beyond the limit of subjectivity in a process of becoming entails the death of the subject. In other words, in order to become whale, Ahab must die; in order to become a poet and Serpentina’s husband, Anselmus must drown; and Melmoth’s final transgression is his descent into hell. Those who remain to tell the tales (the narrators) do not go beyond the limit, but they come dangerously close to it. As a result, they create semiotically affected texts. The relation between sign and subject is one of mutual influence or interdependency. In chapters 3 and 4 I discussed liminal subjectivities from a semiotic point of view. This chapter will examine the different kinds of a-limitation from the perspective of the subject. “O what is Life & what is Man. O what is Death?”3 asks Albion in Blake’s Jerusalem. This chapter seeks to interpret Romantic texts with this question in mind. In the quotation, man is syntactically and philosophically situated between life and death. In Jerusalem, Albion sleeps the sleep of eternal death while he is still alive and fighting for his subjectivity. His two options are eternal life and eternal death. Both options entail the dissolution of subjectivity: eternal life entails becoming one with the divine by annihilating the self. Eternal death means existing in a void. Caught between the two, man is too petrified to choose because there is a need for both subjectivity and individuality, a desire to be whole and unique that counters the dissolution of the subject envisaged in Jerusalem. The following sections analyze the tension between the definition and creation of a whole subject or individual and its a-limitation as transgression, transcendence, and dissolution. How is the subject constructed and by what mechanism is it deterritorialized (or made molecular)? What boundaries are crossed or dissolved in the process? What is the valence of subject a-limitation? The possibilities of subject a-limitation are literally limitless. Only a few examples are provided in this chapter. The discussion will start with the identification of the transgressive subject as a “man of the crowd” in order to illustrate the paradoxical conflation of strong individuality and the desire for subject a-limitation. To lose oneself is, in this particular example, a transgression in the moral sense as well. Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” features one of his 2

3

Schmaus describes this tension with reference to Novalis and his idea of art and subjectivity as the hovering between unity and difference. See Marion Schmaus, Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst. Grenzgänge zwischen Frühromantik und Moderne. Novalis, Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Foucault (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000) 36. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988) 169.

The transgressive subject in Poe: lost in the crowd and afraid of the merge

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numerous transgressive narrators and characters. Compared to the stories of murderers and madmen, the transgression in this narrative is more subtle and yet is perceived as dangerous. Heinrich von Ofterdingen explores the opposite idea: becoming a subject, more specifically becoming-poet, requires transcendence, i.e. the crossing of subject boundaries. Anselmus, Heinrich’s intertextual successor, demonstrates how dangerous becomingpoet can be. It is a process that a single subject cannot engage in by itself. Without Serpentina, Anselmus cannot decipher the language of nature. Heinrich requires the other subject, woman, as well. The observation made in chapter 3 that women in Romantic texts are always already in a process of becoming and can therefore be used as a medium for subject a-limitation is further developed in this section. In order to answer Albion’s extended question about existence: “What may Man be? Who can tell! But what may Woman be?”4, the discussion of Jerusalem in the final section of this chapter will not only focus on the different modes of subject transformation (division, condensation, separation, emanation, merging, unity), but also on the derivative subjects: emanations and daughters, and their counterparts, spectres and sons. Can man be defined through woman? Is woman really the Other in these texts? And what role does woman play in male transcendence or dissolution? Jerusalem as female character in the poem Jerusalem serves not only as an example of the female function in a-limitation, but also provides a model for subjects in the mode of becoming. In the examination of Jerusalem as poem (sign), woman (subject), and city (space), the three dimensions of a-limitation are brought together.

The transgressive subject in Poe: lost in the crowd and afraid of the merge The narrator at the boundary The sign is unreadable. The subject is a criminal. The space is London. A homodiegetic narrator sits at a “large bow-window of the D---- Coffee-House in London.”5 The particular place is only hinted at; the multitudinous spaces of the city dominate the scene. The narrating I has a fragile body recovering from illness and is in good spirits because, despite (or because of) his convalescent state, his mind transcends its natural capacities. He feels sharp and focused. Even pain gives him pleasure. In this strange and excited state that negates the body by disorganizing it through sickness and masochistic feelings, the narrator observes the world around him. He is in a closed room, but the win4 5

Ibid., 176. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin, 1982) 475.

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dow connects him to the outside, to the city. Situated directly at the transparent boundary between the manageable company in the room and the unmanageable crowd outside, the self is content as an individual that is separated from other people (the few in the room and the multitudes outside). The smoky panes of the window covered with the dirt of industrialized London blur the outside while the narrating subject sits in the secure inside space.6 As it gets darker outside, the crowd swells: “dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door”.7 The narrator is increasingly intrigued by the outside space of the city: At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.8

He perceives the crowd as an indistinct open space as is evidenced by the watery images “tide”, “rushing”, and “tumultuous sea”. At this point, the crowd appears to be one being or rather one space made of a multiplicity of random heads. The correlation of darkness and fascination with the crowd implies the danger of this multiplicity and outside space.9 The subsequent observations made by the narrator contravene the effects of the dark multitude. As he continues to observe the crowd, its nature changes from an indistinct mass to a more individual form. The narrator descends to the description of details and the “innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance”.10 In the process of observation, the subject is born through differentiation. The narrator treats the passing people as signifying signs: their clothes, hair styles, accessories, and movements are indices for their occupations. From clerks to prostitutes, all subjects within the crowd seem to have recognizable features that can be deciphered.11 In other words, these subjects are conventional signs that can be detected and defined.12 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

See Kevin J. Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.4 (2002): 451. Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 475. Ibid., 475. His strong interest in the movement beyond the glass could be read as a threat to his selfhood. See Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 85. Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 476. The narrator gains access to the individual by reading his or her appearance. On the parallel between reading a book and reading a person in “The Man of the Crowd” see Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” 448. Because of these mechanisms and its publication just before the Dupin stories, “The Man of the Crowd” is often interpreted as a detective story concerned with deduction and comprehension. See Denis Donoghue, The Old Moderns. Essays on Literature and Theory, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1994) 11. And Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 79–

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For this reason, they are not dangerous and do not require much speculation or scrutiny. By sorting and classifying the masses according to their features, the narrator slowly approaches the single subject. He divides the many figures into classes, divisions, kinds, races and allots them places on a scale. ”Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation”,13 elaborates the narrator. Not only the indistinct masses, but also certain categories within the crowd arouse his curiosity. He is sensually affected by the lower and criminal elements of the crowd, but keeps watching them despite the pain the darker side of the crowd causes his eyes and ears. Again, darkness and curiosity are connected: “As the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene”.14 Through the metaphor of deepness he expresses the desire to know and understand combined with a masochistic pleasure in the pain this knowledge causes. Reading people and reading smooth urban space that does not submit to the ordered appearance of the business is painful. Wildness, physical contact, and noise render the act of reading an agonizing and almost nomadic experience, which is intensified as the night progresses. The spectator detects a change in the composition of the crowd, which he still perceives as one composed of many species.15 The rougher people replace the orderly set as darkness and artificial light replace the dying day. After having observed the crowd as a liquid space and as a multitude made up of different classes, the street lights in the darkness now allow him to examine individual faces. In three steps, the narrator has closed in on the subject as an individual. Yet he is not able to capture the subject completely. His mind can read the history of the subjects passing him, but he can only cast a glance at the passing faces. Face and mind are not fully connected.16 Information floods his hypersensitive brain as the narrator’s own subject boundaries become permeable. While the narrator comes closer to the perception of individual subjectivity and becomes more refined in his ability to read people, he needs to loosen his grip on his own subjectivity. Understood as a dark version of the Romantic imagination,17 his telepathic abilities are part of subject a-limitation. Understood as a semiotic process, it is a highly idiosyncratic reading based on intuition and supernatural skills that leads not only to the breakdown of discourse but also to a near breakdown of subjectivity. The narrator’s advancement into the liminal regions of subjectivity, where the subject is receptive to the connection to others, is depicted by his

13 14 15 16

17

105. I will show that the first person narrator is not deducing, but rather engages in a process of prejudiced semiotics. Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 477. Ibid., 478. On the difficulty of distinguishing between the individual and the crowd as individual see Donoghue, The Old Moderns. Essays on Literature and Theory, 19. Cf. Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 81. Brand argues that by looking at the face, the narrator has access to the mind. I would argue that seeing visually and seeing mentally are two different processes in Poe’s story. Despite the imperfect conditions that only allow for quick glimpses, the narrator can read the minds of people. See Donoghue, The Old Moderns. Essays on Literature and Theory, 13.

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proximity to the boundary that separates him from the crowd outside: “With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob”.18 While he sits at the window at the beginning of the narrative, his face is now pressed against the diaphanous boundary. His mind is open and his body ready for the transgression of the boundary.

The face in the crowd The decisive event that triggers the transgression of the boundary and the exit from the safe space happens at that very moment. At this moment, a paradoxical development takes place: as the narrator focuses on a specific subject, he begins to lose his own boundaries. The narrator sees a face, “a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression”.19 A special subject, one that stands out from the crowd, one that is defined by the very nature of its idiosyncrasy prompts his own transgression. It bears no likeness to anything the narrator has seen before. The gradual perception and conception of subjectivity has come to a halt with one being which seems to be an individual. However, the immediate association of the narrator compromises this newly discovered individuality. The individual looks like the devil, or, more precisely, like a devil in a painting,20 and the telepathic information the narrator receives confirms his visual image: vast mental powers are combined with terror, despair, and dark emotions such as bloodthirst. The exceptional individual is open because it is already mythical. As the corporeal manifestation of an eternal principal or an eternal and mythical agent, this subject is a topos. The textual or semiotic nature of the man is further supported by his suitability to represent the devil as an iconic sign in a painting. Only a few lines are read from this diabolic intertext, most of it remains confused and paradoxical, but they suffice to intrigue the narrator: “‘How wild a history,’ I said to myself, ‘is written within that bosom!’ Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view – to know more of him.”21 As Ishmael is drawn to the deep and diabolical Ahab and his animal counterpart, Moby Dick, Poe’s narrator is drawn to this border-line subject. The exceptional subject has become a sign to the narrator. Yet this subject-sign is more intriguing than the simple indexical signs and the minds of the other people in the crowd. His glimpse of the meaning of this sign incites a desire for interpretation that – as the first paragraph of the narrative reveals – will remain undeciphered. Before the narrator commences his actual story, he contemplates the idea that some books cannot be read and some secrets cannot be told. The inclusion of these preliminary remarks in 18 19 20 21

Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 478. Ibid., 478. Poe is referring to a painting by Moritz Retzsch who illustrated Goethe’s Faust. See Donoghue, The Old Moderns. Essays on Literature and Theory, 10ff. Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 478.

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the interpretation of the narrative leads to the conclusion that it is also a story about reading, a story about reading books and reading people, or reading people like books. The well-educated narrator is not only a reader of books (as his many quotations and his partiality to coffee-houses show) but also a reader of people (as his capacity to read minds shows).22 He uses a quotation about a book to introduce his story about a man: “It was well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst [sic] sich nicht lesen’ – it does not permit itself to be read.”23 The narrator is transgressing cultural and language boundaries in order to explain the essence of his story. By drawing on a foreign linguistic space, he emphasizes the illegibility of some signs. The German book he refers to could be a German edition of the Latin book Hortulus Animae, mentioned in the same context at the closing of the narrative.24 Thus, the signified of the sign would be buried under foreign layers of text. Even the German quotation about the book suggests a distortion of signifiers (and thereby of signifieds). The use of the male pronoun instead of the neutral pronoun it (es) may very well be a mistake, but it also links the subject (he, the man, er) closely to the text (it, the book, es). The story begins with an unreadable secret sign and continues with an unreadable man. What is the crime at the heart of this fiend that is so terrible that it must not be communicated? The narrator has to know and does not hesitate to leave the coffeehouse in order to enter into the crowd so as to merge further with this exceptional individual who might be a terrible criminal as not only the insight into his mind but also his appearance (ragged but equipped with a diamond and a dagger) suggest.

The desire to merge with “the man of the crowd” Not only does the narrator desire to know more about the enigmatic individual, he also engages in further dark desires. When the fog turns into rain, the commotion of the crowd increases and the narrator enjoys the dangers of the outside space: “For my own part I did not much regard the rain – the lurking of an old fever in my system rendering 22

23 24

For more detail on the narrator’s skills see Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” 448f. Hayes also demonstrates that the reading of a newspaper (or a book) is analogous to reading people as the parallel construction of “poring over advertisements” and “peering” through the window shows (see 450f.). Hayes also provides the cultural context for Poe’s reading analogy: growing literacy, the perception of the city as a signifying space, and the importance of print media. Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 475. Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” 460. Hortulus Animae would have been a partially readable book for a general readership in Germany. I say partially because it was in Latin and therefore unreadable for most people, but it also included numerous pictures that could be read by all people (see 462–64). The mistake (er-es) in the quotation could, as some scholars argue, be intentional. See Thomas S. Hansen and Burton R. Pollin, The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe. A Study of Literary References in His Works (Columbia: Camden House, 1995) 52.

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the moisture somewhat too dangerously pleasant.”25 For a moment, the narrator desires the return of illness to his convalescent body. He desires death. His discovery of the individual thus coincides with the narrator’s desire to merge with this man, his exit from the safe and dry space of observation, his immersion in the crowd and an entailing desire for death. He willingly exposes his fragile body, previously protected by the glass boundary, to the multitudes outside. Following the man closely, the narrator walks at his elbow – a position usually reserved for the devil himself. Forced by the proximity to him, he imitates the fiendish man and assumes the devil’s place. With the immersion of the old man in the crowd, the narrator is losing his identity by transforming himself “in an uncanny visualization of his own fugitive double”.26 The merging has begun. His observations now describe the activities of the old man in the evening, at night, and during the following day. Crossing, and re-crossing the crowd, always in search of more people, the old man speeds from place to place. From a busy bazaar, to hotels, to populous avenues, to theatres, to the poorest quarters of desolation, the two men run through the city in search of both life and death. It is a strange hunt that grants barely any further knowledge. Drawn to crowd, the old man walks through the city, whose many different areas enable him to locate multitudes at every possible hour of the day. Moving steadily to and fro in repetitive patterns, the old man exhibits a mechanistic and alienating behavioural pattern. The man’s movement is seemingly aimless, yet he follows his own lines into the crowd. Swimming in the masses, the strange pair do not transverse the ordered or striated space of the city, but rather obey a different rule, one that seems random and confusing to the uninformed observer.27 Finally, the narrator is too exhausted to follow the man any further: “I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face.”28 The narrator has reached his own limits. If he follows the man of the crowd any further, he will die. A final attempt to understand the subject by scrutinizing his face and forcing a mutual recognition fails. To the man of the crowd, individuals do not exist – he cannot see the single subject and the subject cannot read him. Self-differentiation or individualization in opposition to the Other fail because there is no Other to the man of the crowd. This moment of failed individualization through the recognition of the Other also hints at the proximity of the narrator to the man of the crowd. Having imi25 26

27

28

Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 479. Félix Martin Gutiérrez, “Edgar Allan Poe. Misery and Mystery in ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 8 (2000): 169. Also see Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 83. The phenomenon, here described in terms borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial theory, could also be perceived as representing the experience of modern urbanity in general. See Donoghue, The Old Moderns. Essays on Literature and Theory, Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 481.

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tated the man of the crowd, the narrator has become so much like him that he is not recognized as an individual. Yet the narrator has not become the man of the crowd. He admits that he cannot read the man and that he is perhaps one of those books that can and should not be read. The old man is “the type and the genius of deep crime,” says the narrator, “He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd”.29 The man’s crime is his refusal to be alone. His thirst for blood hints at a vampiric need for the life of other people. Indeed, his energy depletes when he is not surrounded by people he can feed upon. He is the embodiment of the abstract concept of evil feeding off of society. More importantly, the man of the crowd as the unreadable but desired sign is the embodiment of a transgressive Romantic subjectivity figured as the tension between an expressive and powerful individual and a dissolving subject. His exceptionality sets him apart from the crowd and yet he merges with the crowd and cannot exist without it. The two words ”man” and ”crowd” are combined in his description, providing a metaphorical signifier for the Romantic concept of subjectivity. The liminal subject, the border-line of the crowd, is the narrator’s point of access to the crowd and his own desire to merge with the multitudes outside. The narrator’s (unsuccessful) reading of the man of the crowd as a criminal results from his own predisposition to subject a-limitation. He creates the subject and the sign he needs. The man then infects the narrator with the desire to know more and participate in a different kind of subjectivity. Prior to the encounter with the man of the crowd, the narrator can only observe and classify the crowd according to categories. His insight is limited by his own position behind the blurry windows. He can only briefly merge with other people. His predisposition to a-limitation leads to a fascination with the border-line individual – the point of entrance to the crowd. Like the narrators in the previous chapter of this study, however, this narrator does not transgress the final limit. The disorganization and disintegration of his subjectivity starts: his illness, his enjoyment of painful experiences, his feverish death wish, his imitation of the man of the crowd, and his final exhaustion are only approximations of the experience the man of the crowd has. Verging on the body without organs, the narrator draws back at the last moment. Fear of merging causes the narrator to retreat before he can become a man of the crowd as well. Liminal subjectivity must remain unreadable because carried to an extreme it is unimaginable.30 Human needs are nothing to the man of the crowd – his body exists only as an incomplete machine that continually needs to connect to other subjects in order to keep functioning. The crime of not being a conventional subject is too great, his semiotic equivalent too difficult to understand, and too dangerous to follow through. 29 30

Ibid., 481. Brand reads the narrator as a flâneur who preserves his individuality and the man of the crowd as a gaper who is not separate from what he experiences. She emphasizes their epistemological proximity: in the end both may seek “nothing more than a stimulating spectacle to relieve [their] boredom”. Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 84f.

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The man of the crowd is a transgressive sign because he is an unreadable intertext that is simultaneously open (topoi of the devil and the wanderer) and secret (he does not permit himself to be read). His crime might be murder, vampirism or the like – his semiotic crime is his illegibility.31 Conventional subjectivity is transgressed as well. Not only the illegibility of the subject, but also his liminal position between being a strong idiosyncratic individual and dissolving into the crowd, constructs the man of the crowd as a transgressive subject. He uses the city for his transgressive actions. Only a space so full of people allows him to satisfy his dark desires in the crowd. In doing so, he appropriates London as a space of a-limitation.32 Through his movements, space also becomes unreadable.33 He reorganizes the city’s code into something the narrator does not comprehend. His travels or wanderings, the change of speed, the mad repetitions, and the aimless pursuits of life change the readable cityscape. It becomes the smooth space of crime and of the crowd.

The transcendent subject: becoming-woman, becoming-plant, becoming-poet Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s point of access Edgar Allan Poe’s man of the crowd is a transgressive subject in various respects. The narrator proclaims he is a terrible criminal and decides it is best to abandon his own efforts of understanding such a great transgressor. Narrator and critics alike assign a negative valence to the transgressive man of the crowd. In this light, Poe’s story can be read as the delineation of modern urbanity and criminality and its frightening effects for the individual.34 Yet moral transgression and the corresponding loss of self are enticing to the narrator (as well as to the critics who feel a need to write about the story). The idea of merging with someone or dissolving into something else exerts an undeniable attraction. It contradicts the idea of a stable identity, of society, and of order by carrying thinking and physicality to a sublime limit. While Poe uses Gothic urbanity to delineate the negotiations between individual identity and loss of self, other Romantic writers use different images for their literary representation of subject a-limitation. 31 32 33

34

See Gutiérrez, “Misery and mystery,” 170. From the perspective of cultural history, the urban criminal uses the crowd as a concealing environment. See Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 86. Brand argues that the man of the crowd renders all urban space as well as the entire crowd illegible. Ibid., 88. I would modify this statement: he enables the narrator to experience signification and movement in a different manner, but does not question the possibility of meaning or order more generally. The text remains in a liminal space between meaning, spatial striation, subjectivity, and a-limitation. Ibid.

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Poe’s point of access to subject a-limitation by way of merging with the crowd (which consists of multiplicities) is the subject at the border-line: the man of the crowd. Novalis’s Heinrich also needs a point of access for the construction and transgression of his subjectivity. This starting point is woman. Heinrich von Ofterdingen tells the story of young Heinrich and his travel experiences, which help him on his way to becoming a poet. A dedication at the beginning of the novel explains what enables Heinrich to pursue this profession. The novel is dedicated to his muse, a woman in the mode of becoming. The pronoun ‘du’ (you) opens the poem. The speaker addresses a ‘you’ thanking him or her for awakening the speaker’s noble drive to look deeply into the soul of the world (“Du hast in mir den edeln Trieb erregt / Tief ins Gemüth der weiten Welt zu schauen”35). Knowledge is connected to the sexual desire for a subject that possesses a higher form of wisdom.36 All-powerful, the ‘you’ enables the ‘I’ who reluctantly manifests his own self in the form of possessive pronouns. The speaker associates not only knowledge, but also security with the ‘you’. He or she can carry the speaker safely through the storm. In the second stanza, the self assumes a stronger presence. The ‘I’ occupies more room, literally grows as a physical being and as a textual presence in the poem. By changing the narrative situation from first-person to third-person figural narration, the ‘I’ becomes its own object (a ‘he’) and thus reflects on its own existence. In German Idealism, the separation between ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’ is part of the setting of the self. Thus, the change in narrative situation is part of the linguistic and mental process of self-realization. Novalis, however, was critical of this Idealistic self-realization as his studies of the German Idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte show. For Novalis, reflection does not lead to a real understanding of the self because it destroys unity, or the absolute, by dividing it into subject and object and past, present, and future.37 Consequently, the construction of the male self is attempted, but not yet achieved in the second stanza of the poem. 35 36 37

Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol.1. Das dichterische Werk, ed. Richard Samuel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 239. Novalis establishes a similar connection between the night, desire, and transcendence in his “Hymnen an die Nacht”. Ibid., 155. See Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen, Edition Suhrkamp,, 5th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989) 248–61. According to Novalis, Fichte’s notorious equation I=I does not work because it already implies the difference of the two relating elements. Absolute being can only be revealed through non-being; the representation of absolute identity is thus not possible. As soon as the self has knowledge of its own self, it has become its object. Unity is destroyed. While Fichte perceives ‘being’ as an intellectual assumption, and starts thinking of the self as feeling in his later publications (Grundlage des Naturrechts), it can only be an immediate feeling for Novalis. The self is not accessible to the self; it remains a dark feeling, even an enigma. Of course, Novalis’s concept of approximative subjectivity is only one among many. Schlegel, for example, understands eternal reflection as the approximation of the absolute. For a detailed elaboration see Christian Iber, “Frühromantische Subjektkritik,” Fichte und die Romantik. Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel und die späte Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Wolfgang H. Schrader, Fichte Studien

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The addressee, the “Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen”38 (ur-image of perceptive and mild women), is as important as the self because she took care of the child and the youth. This notion of the other subject (female subject) is different from that in the first stanza. While the woman in the first stanza seems to be a specific person, a very powerful and exceptional subject, the tender caring mother/lover figure in the second stanza is not a person but an ur-image. As the self of the poem gains more strength, the other becomes more unspecific. From the lover in the first stanza, woman has turned into woman (lover or mother) in general, and finally into the image of woman. The last two stanzas of the first part (the poem consists of two sonnets) describe the effects the undifferentiated image of woman has on the speaker. Due to her love, the speaker/self can transcend “irdische Beschwerden”39 (earthly toils) and can dedicate himself to art provided that she is his muse and his “stiller Schutzgeist” (silent guardian spirit). Despite the ‘you’ being a powerful factor in the speaker’s/self’s process of becoming-poet, she is neither a person nor an individual as might be assumed at the beginning of the poem, but rather a mythical ghost-like image. Yet, this non-subjectivity is the very reason for her powers. I suggest reading the first part of the poem as the depiction of two processes of subject development. A passive speaker/self grows from child to youth to poet while a powerful woman becomes lover, mother, image, muse, silent spirit and thus loses her human and corporeal identity to assist the speaker in the fulfilment of his vocation. In the second sonnet, it becomes clear that transformation and transcendence are goals the self/speaker/poet strives to achieve: “In ewigen Verwandlungen begrüßt / Uns des Gesangs geheime Macht hienieden”40 (In eternal transformations bids us welcome / here the secret power of song). The woman from the first part has turned into song or poetry engaged in eternal transformation. Her uncertain identity (lover/mother/image/ muse/spirit) is not a problem but an asset that makes her the embodiment of poetry and inspiration.41 Poetry is not something static, but rather, like her embodiment, it is ever

38 39 40 41

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997) 115ff. The problem of reflection versus feeling and Novalis’s solution of ordo inversus (the reflection of a reflection that recreates an approximation of or a yearning for the immediacy of feeling) is a disputed issue in Romantic studies. See Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen; Iber, “Fichte und die Romantik”; Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdoppelung. Die frühromantische Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987); Schmaus, Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst. Following Iber, I understand Novalis’s Fichte Studies to be the first Romantic critique of subjectivity. Iber identifies the necessity of the analysis of Novalis’s works against this background, for which the analysis of Heinrich von Ofterdingen in this study shall provide a starting point. See Iber, “Fichte und die Romantik,” 121. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 239. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 239. Conventionally, scholars interpret the women in Novalis’s works as inferior, silent, idealized females. Most prominently see Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800 1900, 4th ed. (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2003). Helfer even radicalizes Kittler’s argument that woman is used by man to ac-

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changing, ever becoming. In the shape of poetry, woman leads to knowledge and delight and ultimately creates the poet: “Ich ward durch sie zu allem, was ich bin”42 (Through her I became everything I am). Only through woman does the self enter becoming-being and the process of becoming-poet. The last stanza lifts the process of becoming to a new level: “Noch schlummerte mein allerhöchster Sinn; / Da sah ich sie als Engel zu mir schweben, / Und flog, erwacht, in ihrem Arm dahin.”43 (My highest sense was still sleeping / when I saw her floating towards me as an angel, / and flew, awakened, thither in her arms.) Closing with this image of transcendence, the poem describes the development of a self into a poet culminating in the transcendence of the self. The dissolution of the boundary between self and object/other (for example, nature) is at the same time the construction of the absolute self and its dissolution in the absolute/chaos/unity. Woman is the necessary prerequisite for becoming-poet and for vanishing into thin air (for becoming-imperceptible) because the self needs to find access to the process of becoming. Woman can provide this access because she is already becoming. This section will show that the development of the subject and its immediate deterritorialization or dissolution (transcendence), which the poem describes, is elaborated in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Only through his encounter with women and other beings in the mode of becoming – becoming-woman, becoming-plant or becoming-sign – can Heinrich become a poet.

A glimpse of becoming-woman: Heinrich’s dream of the blue flower At the beginning of Heinrich’s journey were the words of a stranger, the desire to see the blue flower, and a return to natural semiotics. After having listened to a stranger’s stories, Heinrich has a strong image of a flower in his mind that he immediately anthropomorphizes: “Ich hörte einst von alten Zeiten reden; wie da die Thiere und Bäume und

42 43

quire his own voice by contesting that woman is “ultimately unnecessary” (305) to man. Autopoiesis is coded as male and thus man is actually the source of poetry. See Martha B. Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism. The Poetics of Gender in Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Eichendorff,” The German Quarterly 78.3 (2005) 299–319. Alice Kuzinar and James Hodkinson, for example, depart from the negative evaluation of woman’s role in Romantic texts and explore women’s voices as “a form of high poetic discourse” (Hodkinson, 103). See James Hodkinson, “Genius beyond Gender. Novalis, Women and the Art of Shapeshifting,” The Modern Language Review 96.1 (2001)103–15, Alice Kuzniar, “Hearing Woman’s Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” PMLA 107.5 (1992) 1196–207. Quite often scholars identify the female as part of the narcissistic male ego that is required for self-realization but does not exist in its own right. Marion Schmaus interprets androgyny as a new dynamic model of the self that is set between genders, beyond simple binaries. Schmaus, Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst, 50f. This study follows Schmaus’s trajectory in analyzing the ways of becoming-woman as a different concept of subjectivity. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 239. Ibid., 239.

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Felsen mit den Menschen gesprochen hätten.”44 (I once heard talk of ancient times; how back then animals, and trees, and rocks spoke with humans.) Nature and language are intertwined and Heinrich’s access to truth is through this natural semiotics: “Es muß noch viel Worte geben, die ich nicht weiß: wüßte ich mehr, so könnte ich viel besser alles begreifen”.45 (There must be many more words that I do not know; if I knew more, I could understand everything much better.) Again, knowledge and desire are intimately related. Access to knowledge can be gained by mastering the code of natural language. In this case, natural language literally means that nature can talk. As I will show in the analysis of Heinrich’s dream, the missing link between Heinrich and the language of nature is becoming-woman. In the ensuing dream, itself a liminal space between waking and sleeping, Heinrich walks to a pond that has the same spiritual effect on him as the muse from the poem. He undresses and immerses himself in the water feeling voluptuousness and desire but also receiving new thoughts:46 neue, niegesehene Bilder entstanden, die auch in einander flossen und zu sichtbaren Wesen um ihn wurden, und jede Welle des lieblichen Elements schmiegte sich wie ein zarter Busen an ihn. Die Flut schien eine Auflösung reizender Mädchen, die an dem Jünglinge sich augenblicklich verkörperten.47 (new images he had never seen before appeared, which also floated into each other and became visible entities around him, and every wave of the mellow element nestled up to him like a tender breast. The tide seemed to be a liquidation of lovely girls who came into being when touching the youth.)

Heinrich’s experience is semiotic and physical. The semiotic experience is magical: images become objects. A mental representation (meaning or the referent) materializes into visible referents. Thus, the semiotic chain of object-sign-sign-sign… is interrupted by the embodiment of the sign. The women that are generated are materialized thoughts or signs. They are not subjects in the sense of Cartesian self-realization (I think, therefore I am, or I speak, therefore I am), but they are realized on Heinrich’s body. His physical experience has strong erotic connotations which are based on the non-physicality of the girls.48 Their watery, liquid, dissolved quality allows them to flow over and 44 45 46

47 48

Ibid., 240. Ibid., 240f. The inspiration Heinrich has in the water is connected to the Romantic idea of the ‘Urflüssiges der Erkenntnis’ (the ur-fluidity of knowledge). The water in the pond can thus be interpreted as brain liquid. Heinrich is travelling into his own inner self in the dream. See Antje Roeben, “‘Geheimnisse des Flüssigen’. Die Bildlichkeit des Fließens in Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” Romantische Metaphorik des Fließens. Körper, Seele, Poesie, ed. Walter Pape (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2007) 147. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 242. As Roeben points out, the girls are indistinct and collective. She argues that they are therefore objects while Heinrich is a distinct subject. I would like to open this argument to the notion that the girls are a different kind of subject (a pre-personal subject or a subject in transformation) while

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form a connection with his body. They only become quasi-subject on the male body. Like a desiring-machine, the pond connects to Heinrich’s dreaming body and inscribes his desires on him.49 His own body is no longer separate from objects. Thoughts appear in his mind that are not his own and girls are attached to his naked body. In a way, Heinrich’s dream is a first glimpse of becoming-woman. While he is the material being in the scene, he is also in contact with the watery woman world of becoming.50 A dream within the dream transports Heinrich to the notorious blue flower, the epitome of Romantic Sehnsucht (yearning) and poetic inspiration. The blue flower grows at a well surrounded by many other flowers. It is, however, this exceptional flower that fascinates Heinrich. As he approaches the flower, its stem begins to grow and a face appears between the petals. With her stem and her petals, the flower is not only a woman becoming-plant, but she also bears the remnant of a male being (the stem). The flower is a hermaphroditic form of becoming that functions as a link between the male being (Heinrich) and becoming-plant. The pond and the flower anticipate and facilitate Heinrich’s own becomings. Since they are part of Heinrich’s dream, they also reveal his predisposition for becoming-woman or becoming-plant. Several aspects render Heinrich suitable for his vocation. He lives in a time of transition between old times and the modern age; in the spaces of transition and the intermediate realms, Romantic time still exists.51 The time in which the poet had a divine connection to all other beings is over, though traces of it remain. Heinrich lives in the pleasant time of twilight, in a liminal time between truth and transcendence and rational modernity. To him, dreams still have significance and he still has access to the language of nature through them. His way of talking and thinking reveals his poetic nature to

49

50

51

Heinrich is still a distinct entity that experiences the other mode of subjectivity through this encounter. See Roeben, “Geheimnisse des Flüssigen,” 148. The term desiring-machine is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). The concept of desiring-machines is Deleuze and Guattari’s counter-proposition to the Freudian Oedipal idea of lack. A desiring-machine is a positive way of overcoming subject-object boundaries and repression. It connects to the body without organs and produces desire that is not a priori dependent on socially generated needs. The connection of the body without organs to the desiring-machine entails the creation of subjects that are not fixed identities but becoming identities. Following a similar trajectory, Hodkinson calls this Heinrich’s first “act of shapeshifting” (109). Shape-shifting is a female form of genius that Heinrich learns through his encounters with women. Hodkinson, “Genius beyond Gender.” Kuzinar approaches the interpretation of the watery women from the angle of French feminist theory (Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigary). Women communicate through the body instead of through limited conventional symbolic signs. In this respect, female Naturpoesie is far superior to male language: “woman puts man in an impossible position: short of getting a sex change, he cannot master what she already is”. (1198) Kuzinar analyzes several women-figures including the ones in Klingsohr’s fairytale which have been omitted here. Kuzniar, “Hearing Woman’s Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” 1197ff. My study argues that the sexchange is actually taking place through becoming-woman. See Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 249.

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others: “Es dünkt uns, ihr habt Anlage zum Dichter”,52 (It seems you have the predisposition of a poet) remark the merchants with whom Heinrich travels. Poetry is described in the same terms as Heinrich’s experience in the pond and by the well: It excites the mind and creates new thoughts. It is like magic.

Heinrich’s journey towards becoming In order to become a poet, Heinrich must give up his home and must travel. Travelling – as initiation into a different way of thinking – teaches Heinrich that separation and change are part of life: “Er sah sich an der Schwelle der Ferne […]. Er war im Begriff, sich in ihre blaue Flut zu tauchen. Die Wunderblume stand vor ihm…”53 (He found himself at the threshold to remote distance […] He was about to dive into its blue tides. The magic flower stood before him [...].) The images from his dream are taken up here. Spatial remoteness and travelling are connected to water, dissolution, becomingwoman, and becoming-plant. On his journey, Heinrich hears several stories and meets people who contribute further to his development. What looks like a Bildungsroman at first,54 is really a fragmentary description of becoming-being. The women, who are often paired with fathers or husbands,55 play a particularly important part in this process. Before Heinrich meets his true muse, he is inspired by a princess (in an embedded story) and the Muslim captive Zulima.

52 53 54

55

Ibid., 254. Ibid., 250f. Ofterdingen is often named among the classical Bildungsromane with reservations. Schmaus, for instance, calls it a transcendental Bildungsroman. While other Bildungsromane aim at the constitution of a whole self and its integration into society, the self is dissolved into variable persons in Ofterdingen. Heinrich oscillates between momentary experiences of unity and infinite self-mediation. Schmaus, Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst, 59–67. I would like to go one step further and not only see other male characters as part of Heinrich’s self-exploration and the female characters as sets of variations, but focus on the transformation processes in this self-exploration. While Helfer sees the male side of the double muses as Heinrich’s decisive inspiration, I would like to argue that the male muses are already in the process of becoming-woman. Cf. Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism,” 304. According to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-woman is not necessarily linked to the female subject. Women can also become woman. This fluid gender construction that is based on different concepts of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari call them molecular as opposed to molar) corresponds to the Romantic subject and his/her desire to be and dissolve at the same time. The molar/male part depends on organization, duality, rationality, and symbolic language. The molecular/female part of the subject is a collectivity or multiplicity that is constantly transforming into something else. For the terminology molar/molecular/becoming see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 256–341.

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The princess is the protagonist in a story that Heinrich hears. Having grown up at her father’s court, where poets were always welcome, Heinrich’s fictional muse, the young princess, develops a particular character: “Seine Tochter war unter Gesängen aufgewachsen, und ihre ganze Seele war ein zartes Lied geworden…”.56 (His daughter had grown up among songs, and her entire soul had become a tender song). In this case, woman is already a sign. Her soul is replaced by music and thus she behaves like a sign.57 The boundary between sign and subject is demolished. When she returns to her father’s court after a long absence, she is preceded by her own image in her father’s mind. It is the same semiotic device that Heinrich encounters in his dream. Images in the mind materialize because of the male thinker. The princess is a particular kind of sign. In the beginning of the story, she rides into the park to indulge her fantasies and repeat the beautiful songs she has learned. Her semiotic nature is that of repetition. She functions as a vessel and a medium. On her first visit she loses a stone with strange signs on it, which the hero of the story immediately associates with his own heart that bears the image of an unknown person on it. The sign she carries to the boy (her young lover in the tale), a sign that refers to her, initiates their relationship and also leads the boy to write his first poem. As muse, the princess has no distinctive identity. She is defined by the signs she collects and repeats. She is of an indescribable transparency and her voice sounds like “Geistergesang”,58 the song of spirits. Her indistinctiveness makes her his access point into the world poetry.59 She teaches him music and finally merges with him through sexual intercourse. The story of the princess prepares Heinrich for the semiotically influential women he will later meet in person. Heinrich’s first face-to-face encounter with a woman-cipher is a melancholy one. At one of his stops he meets Zulima, a young Muslim woman. Zulima was captured during the crusades and longs to end her life in imprisonment. She communicates this desire through a song whose origin Heinrich attempts to ascertain. Her mind already dwells in the beyond when Heinrich finds her. She is not a strong presence, but a poetic sign. Like the singing, translucent princess, Zulima is connected to the indecipherable sign. In her homeland, stone plates exist with signs that cannot be deciphered but that incite the desire to know and lead to self-reflection. When they part, 56 57

58 59

Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 260. The princess is a musical sign no less. This increases her fluidity as musical signs signify differently. They comprise an earlier stage in the development of language and are thus closer to nature. At the same time, the meaning of music is less overt and enigmatic because it points to infinity, transcendence, and divinity. Absolute music evolves out of the Romantic idea of music (as promoted chiefly by Wackenroder and Tieck, but also by Novalis and Hoffmann). Instrumental music grants a glimpse of the absolute. See Walter Dimter, “Musikalische Romantik,” Romantik-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Schanze (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994) 407–26. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 262. Kuzniar interprets all female figures as being in command of language. I would argue that the giving up of the self to language is also a positive part of becoming-woman. Cf. Kuzniar, “Hearing Woman’s Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” 1200.

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Zulima wishes to give her lute to Heinrich, but Heinrich declines. He is not yet ready to receive poetry from a woman. Instead he accepts a golden band with Zulima’s name on it. With her name, she gives herself to Heinrich as a cipher. Soon, Heinrich will also be able to accept music from a woman. Before he encounters Mathilde, who is the most important muse/becoming-woman figure in the novel, he develops his faculties with the help of other subjects who are becoming-being. Not only women, but also some men function as connectives between Heinrich and nature, or Heinrich and poetry. Both of the male subjects, the miner and the hermit, who fulfill this function are associated with the subterraneous spaces of caverns and mines. Heinrich explores regions (mines and caves) which are symbolic places in Romantic thought and he meets people (particularly the hermit) who are almost topological in Romanticism.60 Darkness, intricacy, and depth render the mountain interesting to the miner. His movements are in accordance with the mountain because he is not seeking its riches for his own purposes: “Die Natur will nicht der ausschließliche Besitz eines Einzigen seyn. Als Eigenthum verwandelt sie sich in ein böses Gift”.61 (Nature does not want to be the possession of a single man. When possessed, she turns into evil poison.) The miner represents a concept of subjectivity that is open to nature. A mutual consent exists between man and mountain. Man enjoys the mountain from an aesthetic point of view but does not seek to satisfy a need for riches created by society.62 The miner is not separate from nature. He enters into new connections with nature as he explores different mountains and brings forth nature’s metals. His art is never finished. According to the logic of Heinrich’s dream and the information on becoming-woman, a subject whose boundary to nature is permeable must also tend towards poetry and music. Music and dance are indeed the “eigentliche Freuden des Bergmanns”63 (actual pleasures of the miner).

60

61 62 63

Theodore Ziolkowski writes extensively on this subject. Some Romantic writers in Germany were professionally employed in the mining industry, but there are more general reasons for the flourishing of mountain and mining motifs in Romantic literature. In their search for sublime experiences, artists discovered the mountains, but there was also a growing geological interest in mountains and caves. At the same time, the industrial development created a demand for metals and led to the expansion of the mining industry. In England, a critical attitude towards mining prevails because of its clearly visible effects on the environment and the much faster expansion of the mining industry. While coal and steel were the main resources in England, miners in Germany were digging for precious metals. These circumstances led to an idealized perception of mining in German Romanticism: mysterious caves, wise miners, hidden secrets and ancient knowledge symbolized by precious minerals. The subterraneous cavern became a place for the exploration of history, religion, and sexuality. Ziolkowski discusses these aspects in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Das Amt der Poeten. Die deutsche Romantik und ihre Institutionen, trans. Lothar Müller (München: dtv, 1994) 29–82. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 292. Ibid., 290ff. Ibid., 293.

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In a cave, Heinrich discovers his own elusive and transient semiotic nature and his own fragile subjectivity. A hermit, living in the caves, who also claims to be devoted to poetry, shows Heinrich some books. One of these arrests Heinrich’s attention because he discovers himself in it. While he is unable to read the medieval language, he can understand its iconic elements. At that moment, Heinrich is literally finding himself, he is becoming-sign. The book does not imitate the world, but presents a realm of possibilities set in a different time. Heinrich’s encounter with the hermit is one of spatiotemporal and semiotic distortion. The book tells the story of Heinrich’s becoming-poet (travelling, fighting, playing music, meeting people) but also, more importantly, the story of his becoming. Towards its ending, the pictures in the book turn dark and incomprehensible. The book has no end. Thus, Heinrich’s semiotic nature is in a state of becoming. As a semiotic subject, he remains open and unfinished. This could mean that he has yet to find his path, or that he may never reach a stable identity. Heinrich never turns into an organized and concluded book or subject because Heinrich von Ofterdingen remains a fragment. Heinrich and Heinrich are still becoming. Becoming-poet presupposes an open concept of subjectivity. The poet is already larger than a ‘normal’ subject. He is the mind of the world and serves to make new discoveries. His nature is fleeting and he is only a guest on earth. His presence enfolds the wings of everybody just as the woman/muse in the dedication enables the speaker/self to fly. Novalis’s poet is not egotistical, but rather resembles Keats’s idea of a being that does not even possess a body of its own: As to the poetical character itself […] it is not itself – it has no self – It is every thing and nothing […]. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity – he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun, – the Moon, – the Sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impuls, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none.64

His experiences and encounters (the dream, the tale of the princess, Zulima, the miner, the book) help Heinrich to become such a body without organs – an unorganized plane that functions as a creative force: “Alles was er sah und hörte schien nur neue Riegel in ihm wegzuschieben, und neue Fenster ihm zu öffnen.”65 (Everything he saw and heard only unlocked new bolts within him and opened windows for him.) The process of becoming-poet is described in spatial metaphors. Heinrich is not only travelling and thereby crossing boundaries, he is also overcoming inner boundaries. Two encounters shall complete the first stage in this process: one with the poet and one with the lover.66

64 65 66

John Keats, The Complete Works. Vol. 4, ed. Buxton Forman (Glasgow: Gowars & Gray, 1901) 173. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 315. See ibid., 315.

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A semiotic union of desire: Heinrich and Mathilde In Augsburg, the preliminary destination of Heinrich’s first passage, he meets the poet Klingsohr, whom he immediately recognizes as a character from the book in the cave. Again, the sign is antecedent to its referent. In his dream, Heinrich had the idea of woman and it materialized on his body. Here the semiotic subject again becomes an actual subject. As poet, however, Klingsohr is already dissolving again. He is only part of a connection between Heinrich and his own daughter Mathilde: “Sie schien der Geist ihres Vaters in der lieblichsten Verkleidung.”67 (She seemed to be her father’s spirit in the loveliest attire.) Klingsohr and Mathilde function as an entity that demonstrates that a true poet must have a female and a childish side, i.e. must be becoming-woman. Klingsohr teaches Heinrich the theoretical side of poetry and Mathilde teaches him the natural side (dance, music). Mathilde combines all aspects of becoming-woman that Heinrich has experienced so far. Her subject boundaries to nature and to semiotics are permeable. Like Klingsohr, she is a character in the mysterious book. Like the princess, she is already song/sign. When Heinrich finds out that she plays the guitar, he asks her to be his teacher: “O! sagte Heinrich, was sollte ich nicht erwarten können, da eure bloße Rede schon Gesang ist, und eure Gestalt eine himmlische Musik verkündigt.”68 (O! said Heinrich, what can’t I expect for your mere speech is song already, and your figure heralds a heavenly music.) Her language and her body are song and therefore belong to the presignifying realm of natural semiotics, which is defined by an original language that was expressive of nature and emotions through song, dance, and anthropomorphized nature. Like the princess and Zulima, Mathilde has no self. The princess only repeats songs and Zulima gives her name/self to Heinrich. Mathilde’s voice is a distant echo,69 which means that she also only repeats what has already been uttered. Like the two women prefiguring her, she also has access, or at least a connection, to the indecipherable sign. In a dream, in which she drowns (liquid nature), she tells him a secret word that he cannot remember afterwards.70 Her body is as undefined as her semiotic self. Heinrich recognizes in her the blue flower from his dream; a lily is her face. The blue veins on her cheeks are reminiscent of the miner’s descriptions of minerals in mountains and she is also compared to a sapphire. Her head seems detached from her fragile body.71 Of course, Mathilde is also the woman from the dedication who helps the speaker/self to overcome his selfhood: “Sie wird mich in Musik auflösen. Sie wird meine innerste See67 68 69 70 71

Ibid., 319. Ibid., 323. See ibid., 319. See ibid., 326. See ibid., 319ff. Roeben points out that the veins and her entire appearance are also reminiscent of water. Mathilde will die in water. Her watery nature makes her Heinrich’s muse. See Roeben, “Geheimnisse des Flüssigen,” 149ff.

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le, die Hüterin meines heiligen Feuers seyn.”72 (She will help me dissolve into music. She will be my innermost soul, the guardian of my holy fire.) Thus, in Mathilde we can find the epitome of becoming-woman. She is already open to the processes ensuing from becoming-woman: becoming-child, becoming-plant, becoming-mineral, and becoming-imperceptible. Mathilde enables Heinrich to experience becoming by forming new connections with him. Heinrich says of her that her earthly appearance is just the shadow of an eternal image. Mathilde sees Heinrich in like terms: their relationship is one of interdependencies and constantly revised hierarchies. She is included in his self (innermost soul), but she is also his connection to a transcendent realm. Her existence depends on him (like the existence of the water-girls in his dream). She defines herself as being only through him (“Bin ich doch nur durch dich, was ich bin”).73 Yet Heinrich also defines himself through her: “und bin ich der Glückliche, dessen Wesen das Echo, der Spiegel des ihrigen seyn darf?”74 (and am I that lucky one whose existence may be the echo, the mirror, of her being?) If Mathilde is already an echo and Heinrich sees himself as her echo or mirror, his semiotic nature is even more undefined. Heinrich and Mathilde are no longer separate; they each partake of and depend on the other. The second part of the novel starts with a poem that describes them as united in one image (“Nicht einzeln mehr nur Heinrich und Mathilde / Vereinten Beide sich zu Einem Bilde”.75 (No longer separate Heinrich and Mathilde / they combined into one image.)). They are not one person, but a semiotic unity defined by desire. They mingle, transform, influence each other, and exist somewhere between life and death. In this image of the connection between two beings Heinrich and Mathilde represent the functional principle of the Romantic world. In this world there is no spatio-temporal order (“Keine Ordnung mehr nach Raum und Zeit”76), everything mingles (“vermischet”), intertwines (“in einander greifen”), and the boundaries between dreams and reality are dissolved (“Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt”).77 The introductory poem ends with the notion of separation and death. Mathilde must die in order to become plant.78 At the beginning of the second part of the novel, she has become tree. In her place, a new child appears whose family relations 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 325. Ibid., 336. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 366. Ibid., 366. See ibid., 367. The death of the female subject has also been discussed as evidence of the empowerment of the male poet. (See for example Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism,” 305.) Deleuze and Guattari identify death as the risk of the processes of becoming/deterritorialization/body without organs. (See for example Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 330.) Death or extreme measures (masochism, drugs) are part of their framework that is treated with caution. They do not suggest that suicide or heavy drug abuse are practical ways to becoming-being. Mathilde’s death is only

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to Heinrich are unclear. The girl explains that Heinrich and she have several parents through religious imagery: Maria and the count of Hohenzollern, whom Heinrich met in the caves on his way to Augsburg. Heinrich objects that his parents live in Eisenach and she replies, “Du hast mehr Eltern”79 (You have more parents). This subject is not defined by his relation to his parents anymore. Heinrich has left one system and entered into another where parental associations are open possibilities.80 He accepts this new way of thinking as his own subjectivity and asks: “Wo gehn wir denn hin?”81 (Where are we going?) “Immer nach Hause”82 (Always homeward bound) is the enigmatic reply. Since spatio-temporal order is cancelled, home can be the most distant place on earth. Home is no longer the place where one was brought up, but the final destination of a journey. Just as the sense of parental origination is broadened, the idea of home is enlarged into an eternal and changeable category. Upon his arrival at the cottage, which can be read as both a concrete and transcendent home, Heinrich believes he recognizes the miner. The girl Zyane, however, corrects him: “Du siehst den Arzt Sylvester”83 (You are looking at Doctor Sylvester). Furthermore, the doctor claims to have known Heinrich’s father (from Eisenach). His identity and existence are fluid and independent of time and space. Like Klingsohr he is paired with a woman, in his case Zyane, who triggers his becomings. Zyane is a vegetative woman, a flower that stands out among a multiplicity of flowers. Her name means cornflower. While Mathilde was an exceptional flower in a dream landscape, Zyane is an exceptional flower in the garden of the little cottage. The old man feels an affinity with the multiple flowers in his garden: among them he feels like an old tree. Who better than a man who is becoming-plant to explain the secret of poetry to Heinrich? Heinrich asks him about the essence of poetry and Sylvester replies that he is asking for nothing less than the secret of the greatest indivisibility (“der höchsten Untheilbarkeit”)84. In Novalis’s philosophical system, the highest indivisibility is divinity,

79 80

81 82 83 84

another form of becoming: she is becoming-tree and then she is imperceptible. She enters into new connections and forms of existence. In this sense, death is not a final state, but an act of boundary crossing, i.e. a-limitation. (See Schmaus, Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst, 81.). Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 373. A Deleuzian reading of this passage could come to the conclusion that Heinrich has freed himself from the Oedipal triangle or the extensive system of family alliances. He has started to free his desire from the law (i.e. Oedipal structures of lack and taboos) by accepting multiple possibilities of filiations. He is not obligated to choose between binary oppositions. In Deleuzian terms: Heinrich can now create inclusive disjunctive syntheses. His choice is not between ‘a’ and ‘b’, he can choose both. He is no longer man or woman, human or animal, human or plant, son or husband, he can be all of these. His position in the system has become variable. For the Deleuzian terminology see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 168–89. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 373. Ibid., 373. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 379.

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i.e. the unity of subject and object.85 Philosophy and rationality do not lead to the absolute. The absolute remains a retreating boundary, a limit to human thought. Only poetry provides a means for approximating the absolute where subject and object are one.86 Sylvester continues by explaining that space is divided into infinite worlds that are bundled into larger worlds so that one world eventually leads to all worlds. The idea of multiple possible worlds folded into each other results in infinite combinations of life. Only a divine power can understand their relations, but humans can comprehend parts of it. Novalis develops a similar line of thought in Das Allgemeine Brouillon. He argues that the world is part of a larger system in which everything is connected. Individuation leads to connections with other multiple individualities. The more multiple the individuations and connections are, the more changeable are the individual’s boundaries.87 Poetry is one way of comprehending the infinite relations of worlds and subjects. Heinrich’s predisposition enables him to become a prophet and to apprehend the world through natural language. All three dimensions – sign, subject, and space – are intimately connected in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The world is perceived as an unlimited number of little worlds folded into one another, connected and yet separate, constituting an incomprehensible unity. Like the worlds, subjects are multiple: they have various identities and are not bound by time and space. This is important because time and space are categories that limit understanding to a simple reflection of subjectivity and not to cognizance.88 Language is not bound by time and space either. The language of nature and divinity is a code that can lead to knowledge through all ages but has been forgotten in most. There is a link between the three dimensions in Ofterdingen: woman. In Ofterdingen, women are always in the process of becoming. At first glance, their instable subjectivity renders them subordinate to the male subject. At a second glance, however, it is exactly this instability that constitutes them as subjects capable of both achieving and inducing transcendence. Women have access to nature as divine creation because of their proximity to nature (their becoming-flower). Their intuitive and natural knowledge of poetry and music and their ability to function as a medium for language (as a signifier) make them semiotic vessels of natural language. Thus, women are the key to dissolving subject boundaries and boundaries of language. They are the key to moving from world to world and to transgressing spatio-temporal boundaries. Heinrich’s first vision of Mathilde as flower occurs in an embedded dream. Mathilde is at 85

86

87 88

See Hans Jürgen Balmes, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol.3. Kommentar, eds. Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 181. According to Christian Iber, waiving the demand to achieve the absolute through thinking is the chief difference between Idealism (Fichte) and Romanticism (Novalis). See Iber, “Fichte und die Romantik,” 112. See Novalis, Das philosophische Werk, 494. Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen, 266ff.

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home in various enfolded worlds: in dreams, in Augsburg, in trees, and in death. This means that Heinrich’s journey is a pursuit of becoming-woman.

Heinrich’s becoming-animal, -flower, -stone, -star The reader does not find out whether Heinrich succeeds in becoming-poet. But by the end of the novel he is close to becoming-woman. Not only is he feminized, he also engages in processes of becoming-woman that do not rely on biological categories but that comprise a different conception of subjectivity coinciding with female gender constructions.89 The novel remains a fragment, but Novalis’s notes suggest that Heinrich goes through various stages of becoming. He becomes flower, animal, stone, star (“Heinrich von Afterd[ingen] wird Blume – Thier – Stein – Stern.”)90. Another entry tells of Heinrich becoming-animal and -tree. These passages are remarkable because they contradict contemporary discourses on the distinction between humans and animals and on the perfectibility of man. While quite a few thinkers did not completely dismiss animals as inferior beings and conceded they had similar feelings and mental capacities to humans, most thinkers still perceived animals as inferior and lacking in human characteristics such as rationality, the ability to judge morally, or a sense of the aesthetic. The great chain of being was shaken but not overthrown. Novalis, however, imagines the transformation of humans into animals or even minerals as something positive, even a goal in a process.91 Turning into an animal reverses what is commonly perceived as the natural order. Deleuze and Guattari call this type of non-progressive, creative development ‘involution’ (as opposed to evolution).92 How can Novalis’s protagonist enter this process of involution? Via woman: “Heinrich muss erst von Blumen für die blaue Blume empfänglich gemacht werden. Geheimnißvolle Verwandl[ung.] Uebergang in die höhere Natur.”93 (First, Heinrich has to be prepared by flowers for the blue flower. Enigmatic transformation. Crossing into higher nature.) Deleuze and Guattari write that “all be-

89

90 91

92 93

Similar observations lead Helfer to argue that Ofterdingen, while seemingly privileging male characters, actually also destabilizes gender categories. Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism,” 308. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 392. For more details on Enlightenment discourse and further passages on the human/animal relation in Novalis’s works see Alice Kuzniar, “A Higher Language. Novalis on Communion with Animals,” The German Quarterly 76.4 (2003): 428f. Novalis uses becoming-animal in order to realign man with nature instead of positioning him above nature (429). Thus becoming-animal is becomingnature which equals the dissolution of subject/object boundaries or the realization of the absolute self. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 263. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 393.

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comings begin with and pass through becoming-woman”.94 This assertion is realized in the Romantic form of a-limitation in Ofterdingen. Heinrich undergoes several transformations in a state of voluntary madness (“freywilliger Wahnsinn”95) that seems to enable him to see higher truths. He continues to travel, continues to transform, and accordingly is no longer an individual. Novalis notes: “(Vertheilung Einer Individualität auf mehrere Personen.)” (Distribution of One individuality among several persons). In the end, Heinrich becomes imperceptible because he is one and many. Proper names and characteristics are no longer binding. That is why he can also be a poet. Heinrich von Ofterdingen is no ordinary story of initiation, it is a story of deconstruction in the literal sense of the word. Heinrich is constructed as a subject through the destruction of subjectivity. His subject boundaries are opened to the unconscious (dream), to nature (becoming-flower, etc.), to myth (Heinrich as an intertext), and to divinity (Heinrich’s becoming-poet as apotheosis). Heinrich is the realization of Romantic irony as the tension between the finite and the infinite, the particular and the universal, or the absolute and the multiple. This dynamic subjectivity is, however, not the death of the subject proclaimed in Postmodernist theory,96 but, to a certain degree, Ofterdingen shows what Deleuze and Guattari see in Spinoza: Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. There is therefore a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural.97

Between unity and multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari identify a relation that is exemplified in Romanticism. The difference between their poststructuralist system and Romantic a-limitation lies in nuances. In Novalis’s philosophy, there is still a creator who represents a point of origin and unity, while Deleuze and Guattari employ different rhetoric strategies and different philosophical sources to abolish transcendence in favor of immanence.98 This is their attempt to avoid an a priori assumption of subjectivity. There is no subject to destruct if there was no subject to construct in the first place.

94

95 96 97 98

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 306. On Spinoza’s pantheism in Novalis also see Kuzniar, “A Higher Language. Novalis on Communion with Animals,” 431. Kuzniar arrives at similar conclusions as this study does: “In his advocacy of the freedom of radical transformation, Novalis strikingly heralds Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’”. (432) Kuzniar raises this point, but does not elaborate upon it. Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 395. See Iber, “Fichte und die Romantik,” 121. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 280. One could thus argue that, according to Novalis, the depiction or the discovery of the self is only possible through art and is this also an act of immanence rather than transcendence. See Schmaus, Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst, 35.

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Is there an a priori construction of subjectivity in Ofterdingen? In other words: can Ofterdingen be read as a work of becoming despite the repeated invocation of a divine unifying force? Both the poem in the beginning and the notes at the end of the novel suggest a response in the affirmative. However, though divine transcendence is a goal, Novalis himself pronounces the finite or the immanent as the line of trajectory that is followed.99 Additionally, the divine transcendent remains hidden somewhere within the fragmented subject and the multiple worlds. In the beginning, there is a ‘you’, and an ‘I’, and a ‘he’. Subjectivity is already split into multiple identities and is already approximating complete dissolution. The personal (Deleuze and Guattari would say ‘molar’) is only an approximation,100 a thought that strikes us like a lightning bolt and is gone in the next moment. In the end, Heinrich dissolves in a madness with positive connotations that enables him to cross the boundary between culture and nature. The last notes on Ofterdingen read: “Erst zur Sonne, holen den Tag. Dann zur Nacht. Dann nach Norden. Winter. nach Süden. Sommer. Osten – ‘Herbst’ Frühling. Westen. Herbst. Dann zur Jugend. zum Alter Zur Vergangenheit Zur Zukunft.”101 (First to the sun, fetching the day. Then to night. Then North. Winter. to the South. Summer. East – ‘autumn’ spring. West. Autumn. Then to youth. to old age To the past To the future.) It remains unclear where the novel might have taken the reader: every spatial and temporal direction seems likely, but the formation of a coherent individual does not. The spelling is just as fragmented as the subject and the space it moves through.

The dissolved but unified subject: becoming-Jerusalem Between transcendence and transgression Heinrich’s involution is a journey back and forth between two concepts of subjectivity: the unified, molar, individual and the transcending, molecular becoming-being. The two concepts unite in a very unstable synthesis. The outcome is a subject that never becomes whole, but does not dissolve entirely either. It constantly reassembles into different variations of the same self. Like Poe’s man of the crowd it is a liminal subject: mighty (male) individual and unstable (female) multiplicity at the same time. In Ofterdingen, the unstable subject is a positive thing. Heinrich does not break any laws in his transgressions of conventional subject boundaries. He is not a criminal in a

99

See ibid., 74. See ibid., 57. 101 Novalis, Das dichterische Werk, 404. 100

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city full of poverty and crime. Novalis wrote Ofterdingen around 1800 when early Romantic philosophy was thriving in Germany. Crossing boundaries and becoming-being were seen as a progressive movement despite the awareness that the absolute limit would remain an unattainable goal or a regulative idea. By 1840, crossing boundaries had lost its positive connotations. Poe’s story of the exceptional border-line subject is disturbing. Death is no longer part of transcending ordinary subjectivity but a real threat connected to sadomasochistic feelings of pleasure. Transcendentalism and its celebration of the self are inverted and present their dark sides. The basic tension between two different concepts of subjectivity and their continuous negotiation, however, functions according to the same mechanism: a-limitation. William Blake’s Jerusalem can be seen as a transitory text between transcendence and transgression. It includes concepts discussed in Ofterdingen and “The Man of the Crowd”, and is, at the same time, more radical than both. In its notorious ambiguity it stands for a concept of a-limitation that incorporates the transcendent and the transgressive potential of boundary crossing. Subjects experience various boundary phenomena: separation, unification, condensation, division, and merging. They are multiple (consisting of emanations and spectres) and do not occupy a fixed position within a system (variable identities and family relations). Yet there is a strong tendency and a desire to unite divided subjects, to resist condensation or separation, and to find unity, totality, and the absolute. Instead of treating the states of division as “unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity”,102 I would like to understand them as one possible condition of the subject in a-limitation, the other possible condition being unity. Because of these two contradicting trajectories of thought, William Blake has been assigned very different places in literary history. Sometimes he is reluctantly included in the canon as pre-Romantic. Sometimes he is awarded a seat in the hall of Poststructuralist fame.103 In light of the recently diagnosed Romanticism of contemporary theory, these are not mutually exclusive opinions. On the contrary, Blake embodies the very tension that defines a-limitation as the oscillation between two semiotic systems or two concepts of subjectivity. In Jerusalem, he writes: “There is a place where Contrarieties are equally true”.104 This place of a-limitation is Jerusalem. The subject of a-limitation is Jerusalem. Its semiotic representation is Jerusalem, the poem itself. In this section, I will discuss Jerusalem in order to analyze the different kinds of subjects in the mode of becoming-being, the different kinds of subject boundary crossings and their functions. As Tristanne J. Connolly correctly states: “Blake conceives human

102

Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) 11. Blake’s alleged poststructuralism is often asserted without explanation. Rothenberg contends that Blake responds to similar issues which concerned the poststructuralists, among them the constitution of subjectivity and the nature of semiosis. See Molly Anne Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993) 1ff. 104 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 196. 103

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beings as multiple”.105 Blake employs nearly every possible means to disassemble the subject that the history of subject philosophy provides. He returns to myths, types, topoi, and to God, he questions the ability of thought and language to position the self, questions the definition of the self through the other, and finally one could also argue that he goes as far as contemporary theory does by assuming that there is no a priori subject to destroy, but that a different concept of subjectivity altogether should be thought.

Between death and life: Albion Jerusalem is a poem “Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through / Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life.”106 This is the theme the unnamed narrator introduces in the first chapter. It is a vague but by no means incorrect description of Jerusalem. Someone is sleeping and experiencing a state of eternal death and this entity awakens to undergo salvation. Within the poem there are those who try to awaken him (Jesus, Los) and those who keep him in his fallen state (Vala, Hand). Divided into four chapters, but observing the triadic model of history that many Romantics, most prominently Novalis, adopted, the poem relates the protagonist’s original states, his falls, and his resurrections. This main protagonist is the first troubled subject I will examine. He is the Giant Albion, a man in human form and also the country of England. In the beginning of the poem, he is asleep and refuses to listen to Jesus’s wake-up call. He refuses because he wants to preserve his selfhood. Jesus says: “Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand! / I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine […] Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me: / Lo! we are One”.107 Jesus proposes a relation of mutual inclusion. He wants Albion and himself to fold into each other, to merge into one. Albion, however, is afraid of such a merging: “But the perturbed Man away turns down the valleys dark; / [Saying. We are not One: we are Many, thou most simulative]”.108 Unlike the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” or Heinrich von Ofterdingen, he does not feel the dangerous but stimulating desire to merge. He understands Jesus’s concept of unity as a form of suffocating love. Instead of merging into a unified subjectivity, he prefers to reign over his land and rule according to his own “Laws of Moral Virtue”.109

105

Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (Houndmills et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 125. 106 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 146. 107 Ibid., 146. 108 The passage in square brackets is not printed in every manuscript. Ibid., 146. 109 Ibid., 147.

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Critics call the depiction of subjectivity in the poem inconsistent.110 This inconsistency is due to two different concepts of subjectivity that collide in Jerusalem: divine unity and human selfhood.111 They correspond to two semiotic systems: divine signifieds (and revelatory signifiers) and arbitrary signs. Jesus wants to join with Albion to create a world that is full of love and sense. Albion wants to remain an individual (“man alone can live”)112 and create his own moral systems and thus also make sense. For this reason, he refuses to unite not only with Jesus, but also with his emanation, Jerusalem, leading Jesus to inquire: “Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem / From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?”113 Why is Albion’s emanation so important? Unity between man and man, and between man and God, is only possible through emanations: “When in Eternity Man converses with Man they enter / Into each others Bosom (which are Universes of delight) / In mutual interchange. and first their Emanations meet / […] For Man cannot unite with Man but by their Emanations”,114 explains Los in the fourth chapter. Like in Novalis’s Ofterdingen, woman (in the form of an emanation) is the access point to the transcendent dissolution of the self that also bears sexual connotations. For this reason, Albion cries out “Jerusalem is not!” and hides his emanation “in jealous fears”.115 When Albion tries to preserve his subjectivity, he essentially destroys it through his egotism. His disintegration is initially described in spatial terms:116 The banks of the Thames are clouded! the ancient porches of Albion are / Darken’d! they are drawn thro’ unbounded space, scatter’d upon / The Void in incoherent despair! Cambridge &

110

Rothenberg explains that Blake’s different concepts of subjectivity should not be taken as absolutes. Subjectivity is differently constructed by discourse each time. The transcendent subject is only one of several possibilities. Subjectivity remains limited. See Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality. 111 These two concepts of subjectivity correspond to two different religious systems identified by Doskow: oppression and vengeance versus mutual forgiveness. Minna Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem. Structure and Meaning in Poetry and Picture (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982) 47. They can also be seen in the context of rationalism and the Enlightenment. Empiricist selfhood is thus an empty selfhood that can be seen in opposition to the notion of the Neoplatonic self belonging to the transcendental realm. See Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul, xiii. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Blake constructs binary oppositions that are not always self-evident. As I will show, figures cannot clearly be assigned sides in this dichotomy that keeps falling apart in the course of the battles both sides lead. 112 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 147. 113 Ibid., 146. 114 Ibid., 246. 115 Ibid., 147. 116 The relation between inner and outer conditions is particularly important in Jerusalem. When something happens to Albion, it is also happening in space. See Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem, 22.

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Oxford & London, / Are driven among the starry Wheels, rent away and dissipated, / In Chasms & Abysses of sorrow, enlarg’d without dimension, terrible [.]117

Instead of positive expansion (“wake! expand!”, says Jesus), Albion experiences a loss of cohesion: boundaries dissolve into nothingness; space inflates and dissipates.118 This is more than a pathetic fallacy: Albion is England (as Jerusalem is a subject and a city): “Cities / Are Men, fathers of multitudes, and Rivers & Mount[a]ins / Are also Men; every thing is Human, mighty! sublime!”119 Spatiality and subjectivity are not merely intimately linked, they are one and the same.120 The quoted passage also shows that chaos and the collapse of boundaries are not necessarily a positive development. Blake is often seen as a great transgressor of boundaries (for example religious boundaries commonly established between man and God, or good and evil, or the boundaries between different media, such as poetry and painting). In respect to visual art, however, Blake’s opinion on boundaries is surprising at first. In his Exhibition Catalogue he writes: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art”.121 The notions of idea and the boundary-line are directly connected. This means that boundaries are necessary to ensure original thought and creativity. What happens to the spatial Albion after his decision to remain autonomous is therefore a loss of originality. Albion, who perceives himself as god-like and wants to protect his boundaries, in fact loses his boundary-lines. As a subject, Albion subsequently undergoes processes of dissipation that are connected to particular spaces. He is separated from his emanation, who then subdivides and dissipates as well: “Jerusalem is scatterd abroad like a cloud of smoke thro’ nonentity”.122 The non-entity and the void are limitless spaces associated with the state of selfhood. Cloudy, chaotic, dark, tormenting, and hellish non-entity is located at an abyss or a precipice; the void is abstract, a void of doubt, despair, hunger, thirst, and sorrow; it is a “boundless Ocean bottomless, / Of grey obscurity, filld with clouds & rocks & whirling waters”123 into which Albion goes when he is among the oaks. In short, the void is a satanic space.124 It corresponds to the state of selfhood that encompasses self-

117

Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 147. Albion insists on his subject boundaries just as much as he insists on his spatial boundaries, i.e. his mountains. The division of the country into different regions corresponds to the entailing division of Albion. See Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City. William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) 197. 119 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 180. 120 Cf. Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul, 159. 121 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 550. 122 Ibid., 147. 123 Ibid., 186. 124 References to non-entity and to the void are scattered throughout the poem, see ibid., 148, 162, 195, 178, 184, 157, 162, 193, 208. 118

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ishness, pride, and a false sense of chastity: “In Selfhood, we are nothing: but fade away in mornings breath”.125 As a representative of Blake’s age and as a believer in New Science, Albion does not understand that selfhood actually means the loss of the self.126 He refuses to relinquish the recently acquired idea of the philosophical self as a conscious and continuous identity in favor of an unknown dissolution. Jerusalem is not Blake’s only work that opposes the empirical ego – Milton (in Milton), for instance, also has to annihilate his selfhood in order to become a great prophet.127 In Ofterdingen a-limitation is part of becomingpoet. While Heinrich voluntarily delivers himself to becoming-woman (in order to become poet), Albion is more reluctant and refuses to unite with Jerusalem. He is not alone in this fear of merging that eventually leads to dissipation. Enitharmon, Los’s emanation, is also afraid that Los’s plan will lead to her destruction: “I annihilate vanish forever”.128 Los, however, knows that merging, unity, and self-annihilation are the keys to eternity, expansion, and identity.

Between spectres and emanations: the anti-Oedipal family Instead of self-annihilation, Albion experiences division and condensation. From the beginning, he is a divided subject caught in a liminal space between death and life: there is a male and a female part to him. His female form is called Jerusalem. Like a divine emanation, she is not merely created by him, but is derived from him. The connotations of fluidity and the ethereal that also apply to Heinrich’s Mathilde are part of the concept of ‘emanation’ and render Jerusalem an instable subject. Albion’s male part is divided from Albion in the shape of a spectre called Luvah.129 125

Ibid., 187. Blake is a known opponent of empiricist theories of the self, but neither does he blindly accept other, early concepts of the self such as those suggested by Platonism. Gnostic aspects of the material self and the eternal immaterial soul also influence Blake’s concept of the self. See Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul, 14ff. They do not, however, form an exclusive dualism between soul and body as Connolly shows in her study of the body. See Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 141. 127 See Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul, 119. 128 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 252. 129 Doskow’s interpretation that the male part of Albion represents rationality while the female is his prelapsarian part supports this study’s argument that becoming-woman is necessary in any transformation. (See Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem, 56.) It has to be noted, however, that there are several fallen women in the poem. Jerusalem herself becomes a harlot through her double, Vala. Due to the incoherence of subjects, oppositions do not operate smoothly. There is no a priori subject in Blake, but many partial subjects. As soon as Man leaves Eternity (the fall) and splits into different sexes, he is no longer a complete subject. Vala belongs to a group of partial subjects representing selfhood. She is the embodiment of lack and possessive desire. Thus, she is not in the process of positive becoming. What kind of woman is Vala then? Critics do not agree on Blake’s de-

126

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The relations between subjects and their emanations and spectres are complicated and supersede conventional family relations. Subjects have wives (or husbands), daughters, sons, emanations, and spectres. The groups overlap (an emanation can, for example, be a wife or a daughter or both) and relate to each other. Jerusalem’s daughters, for example, are hardly distinguishable in form and function from their mother.130 Albion’s daughters can “divide and unite at will”131 and thus become different persons. They even unite with Vala, who leads to another chain of partial and divided subjects. Jerusalem’s doppelgänger Vala132 is also Jerusalem’s mother, Albion’s lover, and the daughter of Luvah, who is at the same time Albion’s spectre. Luvah is also an intertextually dispersed subject. He is one of the four Zoas and reappears in Blake’s other works. Los also features in other texts as one of the Zoas. His intertextual referents are numerous and his depictions variable.133 The illuminations create even greater confusion: Los looks like the younger Albion and thus becomes his doppelgänger, but Albion also resembles the illuminations depicting Urizen in other works.134 Hand, Albion’s son, is similarly difficult to identify in the illuminations as he seems to have various visual incarnations.135 Drawing a family tree based on Jerusalem would be as impossible as trying to fit the characters into the Oedipal idea of the family (mother-father-child). The system of partial subjects in Jerusalem differs tremendously from known family systems. Los’s notorious exclamation is thus realized in the poem itself: “I must Create piction of women and sexuality. While some see Blake as a forerunner of women’s equality, others highlight misogynist elements in his texts. (Connolly and Hayes provide overviews of recent criticism. See Connolly, William Blake and the Body, ixff; Tom Hayes, “William Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal,” ELH 71.1 (2004): 155ff.) The arguments are very similar to those discussed with regard to Ofterdingen (see footnote 42 in this chapter). The present study argues that women in the mode of becoming can help male subjects bounded by selfhood to transcend their restricted states of existence. From today’s point of view (Bruder proves that Blake was rather progressive for his own age. See Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).), however, the concept hidden behind these women in the mode of becoming cannot be ignored: they are only one part of the male subject that will ultimately be reintegrated and they cease to exist as soon as they have fulfilled their purpose. The annihilation of sexes that is discussed later in this chapter retains a male bias. 130 This led Paley to call them “Jerusalem’s surrogates” Paley, The Continuing City, 184. 131 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 207. 132 The term doppelgänger does not apply invariably to Vala. In many respects, she is Jerusalem’s opposite, but Paley argues that Jerusalem and her surrogates are located at one end of a spectrum along which Vala can move freely. She is Jerusalem’s shadow, but also an inversion of Jerusalem’s multiple identities (for example Mary or Magdalene) and has multiple manifestations (for example Rahab). She is beautiful and destructive. As Paley points out, there is a tendency towards bifurcation in the text, but Blake remains inconsistent. See Paley, The Continuing City, 189–96. 133 A description of Los that focuses on his role as the prophet-poet in Jerusalem and other texts can be found in ibid., 234–43. 134 For more examples of identity in the illuminations see Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem, 28. 135 For details on Hand and the other sons and daughters of Albion see Paley, The Continuing City, 211–30.

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a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”.136 Albion, who tries to establish laws and morals, is part of this impossible system of family relations. A system is based on the idea of relations and mutually exclusive positions. One element is defined by the other element, i.e. by what it is not. If partial subjects have multiple identities and can take up various positions within a system, the idea of exclusive disjunction fails to create order. This contradicts the Oedipal interpretation of Jerusalem.137 The disjunction becomes inclusive, identities become variable, and hierarchies finally dissolve when unity is achieved. The two concepts that are part of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique, the Oedipal triangle and the root-system, are disassembled in Jerusalem.138 I have briefly discussed that Romantic subjectivity surpasses family relations in the discussion of multiple identities in Ofterdingen. When Heinrich is confronted with this form of extended family, he is irritated at first but quickly accepts it as a given. In Blake, the multiple subject is not reflected upon but is presented unmediated and taken to the extreme. Not only subjects but also places are multiple: real cities and countries are juxtaposed with biblical, mythical, and imaginary places. Endless lists of names and places confound the mind.139 There are many existences to choose from (either daughter or wife or emanation or city or…) that even surpass gender boundaries. There are several gender concepts in Jerusalem: men and women, hermaphrodites, and the merging or annihilation of genders. The male and the female are often represented by the partial subjects of emanations and spectres that each fulfill various functions.140 Not only Albion, but other characters such as Los, who is laboring on Jesus’s side to awaken Albion, to build Golgonooza, and to help Jerusalem, have an emanation 136

Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 153. Cf. Paley, The Continuing City, 211. Paley argues that the relationship between Albion and his sons could be read as a return of the repressed. Connolly pursues a similar argument for the relationships between both Los and Orc and between Albion and his sons. See Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 128–54. The polypus and the root stand for the jealous relations between father and son and the phallic law that governs this structure. This also shows that where Oedipal relations are presented, they have a negative connotation. The law (of Oedipus) is harmful and contrasts positive ways of dissolution. Mostly, however, Oedipal relations are undercut by multiple subjects. Jerusalem is often read as the mother of Albion’s sons who pursue her and kill their father. Yet Jerusalem makes it clear that she is not Albion’s wife and her daughters are definitely not the same as the daughters of Albion. Albion’s family may have Oedipal aspects, but it explodes Oedipal triangulation. 138 On family relations see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, particularly chapter 2. On the concept of the root-tree or system see the theory plateau on space in this study and the introductory chapter in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. On the confusion of identity in Jerusalem also see Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality, 76f. 139 The endless list of names and places is not random. Their connotations reveal certain recurring patterns. Many of the cities, for example, are battle sites or are connected to other serious matters such as the slave-trade. See Paley, The Continuing City, 198. 140 Even this binary concept of gender distribution is not exclusive. Sometimes emanations can also be male subjects.

137

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and a spectre. They belong to each other, dividing at the same time.141 The division is a process that also hurts the partial subjects. Los’s spectre tries to prevent him from helping Albion because Albion is responsible for the division and the disappearance of Enitharmon (Los’s emanation), but Los continues his work: “But still the Spectre divided, and still his pain increas’d”.142 A spectre is an animal-like creature: he howls like a wolf and resembles a vampire bat.143 Los’s spectre describes himself as follows: “I am Despair / Created to be the great example of horror & agony: also my / Prayer is vain […] Life lives on my / Consuming: & the Almighty hath made me his Contrary / […] So spoke the Spectre shuddring, & dark tears ran down his shadowy face”.144 The spectre seems to be the externalized other of the subject: its evil animal side. If a person were to enter their own spectre, they would behold their own corruption.145 The spectre shares several properties with other Gothic figures of the period: the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster.146 He is evil and plots against his master, but he is also pitiable because he was driven to this by human forces and human hubris. Most importantly, he has a softer, a good side (as evidenced when he tries to protect Enitharmon for example). The spectre, functioning as opposite, is needed for self-definition and for progress: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence”, Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 147 At the same time, the spectre resists a dualistic notion of good and evil. One could say that the spectre is the evil side of man, but it is also a partial subject that has both positive and negative character traits. The spectre embodies two problematic properties of the human subject, but he is more than just an image of psychic division. One aspect central to the spectre is sexual power. Los uses his spectre to subdue the daughters of Albion. He follows them “as the hound follows the scent”.148 The daughters flee, “they hide in the Druid Temples in cold chastity: / Subdued by the Spectre of the Living & terrified by undisguisd desire”.149 While the fierce sexual energy of the spectre has violent connotations of pursuit and the threat of rape, he also has a creative side. The spectre helps Los build Golgonooza in order to save Albion – even if he does so reluctantly. The furnace is the space in which 141

See Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 149. Ibid., 149. 143 William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2000) 303. 144 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 153f. 145 Ibid., 184. 146 Blake might have seen an engraving of a vampire bat in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition against the Revolted Negroes at Surinam, for which he also created several engravings. See footnote 7 in Paley, The Continuing City, 251; David V. Erdman, Blake. Prophet Against Empire, 3rd ed. (New York: Dover, 1991). 147 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 34. 148 Ibid., 160. 149 Ibid., 161. 142

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Los creates, and it is the space where the spectre lives and labors. Blake’s illumination of the spectre shows him together with Los in the furnace surrounded by fire. Los holds a hammer that resembles a giant phallus. Thus creation, sexuality, and the spectre are conflated in one image. Enitharmon, on the other hand, embodies Los’s soft and loving side.150 Thus, sexuality is not exclusively a property of male partial subjects. On the contrary, women like Vala also possess dark and violent drives. The attitude towards sexuality is ambiguous in Jerusalem.151 There are encounters of love, but there are also encounters of destructive aggression. No mode of sexuality is clearly assigned to a particular gender. The second problematic property embodied by the spectre is reason. Romanticism evolves from a critique of Enlightenment and thinkers like Novalis are careful to stress that rationality alone does not lead to truth, but that intellectual perception combined with feeling is required to achieve that end. Blake attempts similar syntheses. Why then is the spectre an evil combination of reason with sex (or feeling)? At first sight, these two aspects seem to contradict each other, but they are both part of the fallen world and a repressive system. The spectre stands for the moral law imposed by Albion and accordingly, his sexuality is not only violent but also strangely unfulfilled. The vegetating roots beneath Albion are spectrous growths: “Forming a Sexual Machine: an Aged Virgin Form”.152 The spectre is “Sexual Death living on accusation of Sin & Judgment / To freeze Love & Innocence” because he is “Rational Power”153 or “Reasoning Power in Man” set on destroying the Imagination.154 It could be argued that the spectre aims to destroy desire and replace it with sexual laws and codes that obliterate the imagination the spectre is also working for (Los). This means that the spectre is a representative of a system where only restricted, generative, law-governed sexual encounters are possible and where positive desire is repressed. The opposite of this type of sex is love, which is more universal, not determined by rationality, and not restricted to genital intercourse.155 The spectre cannot participate in this polymorphous (anti-Oedipal) love because of the law.

150

Los has often been read as an alter-ego for the author Blake and his emanation as Blake’s wife Catherine; in these interpretations, the spectre resembles William Cowper. Psychological interpretations, which understand the spectre and the emanation as different aspects of a single mind or psyche, are more convincing. Cf. Paley, The Continuing City, 244ff. I would like to argue that spectres are more than aspects: they are partial subjects that (together with emanations and others) comprise the multiple subjects in Blake’s texts. 151 See ibid., 167–72. 152 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 187. 153 Ibid., 215. 154 Ibid., 229. 155 A Deleuzian reading suggests that sexuality belongs to the realm of molar heterosexual subjects whose desires are determined by (Oedipal) rules. Love, however, is a concept of self-annihilation (Blake) and molecular partial objects (Deleuze) that enables the subject to love with its entire body

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The spectre evades clear definition. What complicates matters even further is the idea that man divided from his emanation becomes a dark spectre.156 This means that the spectre is part of a subject, but the entire subject can also exist as a spectre. Either-orexclusions do not apply to partial subjects. Like the emanation, the spectre can be reintegrated into man (or man can be relieved from his spectrous existence). This means that man is divided in a destructive way if he insists on selfhood and on the law. Transgressive man (man who crosses the spectrous law), who surpasses selfhood and law, is on the way to a new form of unity. In order to do so, he must reunite with his emanation. Not every woman is an emanation. The dark side of the sexualized woman that is spelled out in texts such as Eichendorff’s Marmorbild (see chapter 3) is part of a long tradition of depicting women either as angels or as monsters which exists alongside the positive emanations in Jersusalem. While the emanations’ function is very similar to that of the muses in Ofterdingen, the darker women in Jerusalem introduce a transgressive female element into the text that would have been unthinkable in the idealized world of Ofterdingen. The daughters of Albion are described as monsters that “delight in cruelty”.157 Like vampires they drink Albion’s blood under a curtain of blood: “Clothed in the skin of the Victim! blood! human blood! is the life”.158 The vampiric piercing of subject boundaries is destructive and does not bring about unification. The same is true for the taking of other subjects’ skin. Connolly calls this a “perverse union with the victim”.159 Torture and sexuality blur (bodily) subject boundaries and bring Blake’s subjects closer to what Deleuze and Guattari call a body without organs. Bodies are disorganized, fluids and skins are exchanged, but this strategy does not lead to the transcendent limit. It is an act of transgression, which is evil and infinite. Because of the general fluidity of subjectivities in Jerusalem it can be endlessly repeated. Victims are tortured, die, and are doomed to suffer more on a different plate. Consequently, transgression is a process with many interior limits that are crossed and then reappear. It remains a hierarchical process with limited possibilities.160 The openness of a full body without organs that produces subjects in the process is not achieved through torture. A despotic machine tortures the body and splits the subject.

(Blake: entering into each other’s bosoms) in inclusive conjunctions (Deleuze). On the opposition between sex and love also see Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul, 160f. 156 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 203. 157 Ibid., 222. 158 Ibid., 222. 159 Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 149. 160 See ibid., 152.

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Between selfhood and self-annihilation The daughters of Albion have different transgressive means. Not only do they feed on other subjects, sucking their energy, devouring and appropriating their bodies, they are also stones: “Themselves condensing to rocks”.161 Hardness and petrification are outcomes of condensation – a process of subject transformation that is the opposite of merging and uniting. Several characters are involved in processes of condensation. Hand (who is a strongly divided figure with three brains) condenses his own emanations to make them cold and dark in order to destroy Jerusalem.162 Albion condenses ornaments of love into solid rocks “that Man be separate from Man”.163 Condensation changes subject boundaries by closing them. In this process, the interior limit of transgression becomes even more visible. The crossing or opening of boundaries is followed by their immediate closure. In this case (in contrast to Ofterdingen), this is not a version of becoming-mineral. The rock as finite object is not a mode of positive becoming in Jerusalem. The semantic field used to describe condensation contains references to constriction, the combination of selfhoods into a polypus, coldness, incomprehensibility, and hermaphrodism. Hermaphrodism and ambiguous gender constructions can be found in various places in Jerusalem. The blurring of gender boundaries is also depicted in the illuminations, most prominently on plate 28: two naked figures sit on a lily in a tight embrace. Their sexual identities are unclear and are subject to debate and speculation.164 Sexual encounters are not limited to the contact between men and women (or amorphous genders), they include homosexual relations. Jerusalem and Vala are doppelgängers whose union and separation is described in sexual terms: “He found Jerusalem upon the River of his City soft repos’d / In the arms of Vala, assimilating in one with Vala”.165 The lesbian encounter of Vala and Jerusalem includes the bisexual desire for Albion: “Trembling! then in one comingling in eternal tears, / Sighing to melt his Giant beauty, on the moony river”.166 Desire is not enacted in exclusive disjunctions. Different combinations with different connotations are possible. There are two different processes of bringing subjects together and there are two different ways of defining merged sexuality: hermaphrodism and the annihilation of the 161

Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 222. See ibid., 152. 163 Ibid., 174. 164 The interpretations range from fairy queen and fairy king to young Albion and Vala. Mitchell’s reading of the two figures as the lesbian union of Jerusalem and Vala is also a possibility. See Paley, The Continuing City, 169f. 165 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 164. 166 Ibid., 165. Paley reads the passages in conjunction with the design on plate 28. Blake changed the design several times adding even more ambiguity to the (sexual) identity of the two figures. According to Paley, the design undermines the otherwise privileged heterosexual encounters. See Paley, The Continuing City, 172.

162

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sexes. Hermaphroditic sexuality is described as the mixture of male and female.167 The condensation of the two forms is, like the division of male and female, a process of destruction and selfishness.168 Both division and condensation are associated with female aggression. When the female separates entirely from the male, it ceases to be the latter’s emanation, assumes a life of its own, and threatens male life with a veil of blood.169 Misogynist imagery of vampiric women, women who imprison and bind men, and women who refuse to be reintegrated into men can be found in various passages of Jerusalem. Selfhood, whether female or male, is dark and dangerous. In Blake’s text, the Romantic subject is rejected in favor of particular forms of subject dissolution. To simplify matters, there are negative forms of dissolution associated with the concept of false selfhood (division, separation, condensation, hermaphrodism) and positive forms based on self-annihilation (unity, merging, commingling, love). The emanation Jerusalem and her return to Albion epitomize positive subject dissolution. Selfhood encompasses the division into male and female. When “the Male & Female, / Appropriate Individuality, they become an Eternal Death”.170 Jerusalem stands for the reversal of this process. She is the wise female other who knows about the intricate differences between various male-female relations. In contrast to Albion, she does not insist on her human selfhood. On the contrary, she is “struggling to put off the Human form”.171 Like Mathilde, Jerusalem is not an ordinary woman. She is not only in a state of becoming because her body is secondary, but she is also a city – a spatialized subject. In the illuminations she is sometimes depicted as a human woman, but also as a lepidopterous woman with wings. Her winged figure represents eternity, holiness, purity, and immortality. Her translucent appearance is contrasted with the dark opaqueness of Vala, the spectres, and condensed subjects. Yet Jerusalem is not a stereotypical embodiment of goodness. She is also called a harlot by Albion’s followers. Her meaning is determined by the eye of the beholder.172 Jerusalem is a becoming-being that is open to becoming-animal (but not in a vegetative manner) as well as to becoming-space. She is

167

See Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 231. On hermaphrodism and its affinity with Satan see Hayes, “William Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal,” 160. 168 See Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 248. 169 The dominant imagery of veils, webs, and nets has been noted many times. See for example Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 135; or Robert N. Essick, “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 251–71. These images could be understood as enslaving systems in the sense of Deleuzian root-trees. 170 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 250. 171 Ibid., 197. 172 Jerusalem’s moral ambiguity rests in the biblical intertext where she is portrayed as holy city (Isaiah 52) and as hateful person (Ezekiel 16). Jerusalem is not only primordial innocence but also fall and redemption. Again, dualisms do not function as absolutes. See Paley, The Continuing City, 179f.

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enigmatic and elusive and has a direct connection to the transcendent realm of eternity. Therefore she is Albion’s access point to subject a-limitation. Her reintegration into Albion is not a mixture but an annihilation of the sexes. It is not a marriage, but a merging. If Jerusalem and Albion unite, divine unity is made possible. Achieving divine unity, however, is not an easy task. Albion resists while Jerusalem is continually morally or physically attacked and destroyed. Her dark alter ego Vala threatens to conquer her; her children are imprisoned; she is chained, cast out, and trapped in nets and roots. On the other side of the battle lines, Los labors to save her and achieve unity by building cities and battling against the dark forces in order to unite via self-annihilation. This form of subject dissolution preserves its parts and is still forging a whole. The whole consists of minute particulars. Albion’s minute particulars are murdered, degraded, possessed by dark forces, and turned into hard grains of sand.173 Their condensation renders Los helpless because Albion replaces his minute particulars with selfhood, his identity with individuality. The theory of minute particulars is delineated on plate 55. Human organs are kept in “perfect Integrity”,174 but they are not static. They can contract into worms or expand into gods just like time and space can be contracted and expanded at will. The a priori of time and space is cancelled out just like the molar subject. The divine/whole/infinite subject is also part of dynamic processes. Its recovery from states such as division, spectrous existence, condensation, or hermaphroditic mixture is dynamic, for Albion dies many times and assumes many different fallen states and Jerusalem is built many times, and destroyed again. Whether in death or in eternity, existence is not a stable category, but a multiplicity or a body without organs (a body which can be reorganized). That is why minute particulars are so important. Minute particulars are not separate individuals. There are no individuals in Jerusalem. All characters are types and maximally dispersed literary subjects who are intertexts of myths and places. They reappear in other texts and take different shapes in the illuminations. They do not have distinct personalities nor are they coherent. Yet they are particulars or partial objects (of a subject – or even of partial subjects) who are connected to create different preliminary structures. “The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity”,175 someone says in Jerusalem. It is unclear who states this paradox which can be understood to be Blake’s principle of a-limitation. Mountains, cities, rivers, and stars speak before this passage. They all are particulars of a world in which nature has a voice and speaks as a collective identity.

173

Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 194. Ibid., 205. 175 Ibid., 205.

174

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This quotation also expresses the semiotic tension reflected on the subject: infinity and identity are conflated into one figure of thinking.176 It combines the two limits of semiotics (absolute meaning and the infinite deferral of meaning) with the two limits of the subject (powerful individual and dissolved subject approximating non-existence or death). This idea of the one and the many also occurs in Ofterdingen. In Blake, the derivation of this notion is complicated through theological variables. In a first step, the two opposites are reversed: the powerful individual becomes selfhood and approaches Satan as a limit, and the dissolved subject is valued because it is seen to be approaching divine transcendence. In a second step, the idea of the self is translated into the idea of the minute particular and combined with the notion of dissolution (with Jesus passing all limits): “every / Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus”.177 This type of unity permits the existence of a whole that is neither organized by reason nor delimited by boundaries. It contrasts the images of organizing systems: roots, nets, trees that establish hierarchies and bind subjects. 178 Albion is not only bound by the oak and its roots, but also by the nets of consuming females. He can free himself of rational order by embracing a unity that is at the same time multiplicity. In the end, Albion acknowledges his cruel selfhood and follows Jesus into death and resurrection. Jesus, who passes the limits of possibility (while Satan and Adam are only limits),179 can transgress the limit of death. Man, rejecting the concept of selfhood, has the same possibilities: “But there is no Limit of Expansion! there is no Limit of Translucence. / In the bosom of Man for ever from eternity to eternity”.180 Becoming-woman by uniting with one’s emanation is a step on the way, but the experience of a-limitation as the infinite transgression of the limit is only possible by uniting with Jesus. This union is attempted several times in the poem, most clearly in the fourth and last chapter. Albion voluntarily surrenders his selfhood, throws himself into the furnaces (a place of dialectic destruction and creation, where some kill and others build) to experience a vision, though not necessarily real transcendence. What follows does not resemble paradise or a closure of any sort. The reader is presented with an apocalyptic vision of annihilation, incomprehension, and expansion. Man is divided into four parts pointing in the four directions of the compass, west, east, south, and north: “And the dim Chaos brightend beneath, above, around!”181 Spatialized man creates time and space 176

Connolly calls this combination “multiplicity coexistent with integrity”. The fact that for Blake the divine state is not totality or absolute unity is derived of the idea that the Christian monotheistic God is a consolidation from many other gods and also has contrary voices in figures such as Satan. Thus “Blake transfers God’s multiplicity to the human psyche”. In the end, he reconciled unity and diversity. See Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 163ff, 221. 177 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 251. 178 On this imagery also see Doskow, William Blake’s Jerusalem, 77. 179 See Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 177, 213. 180 Ibid., 189. 181 Ibid., 257. Rothenberg points out that chaos does not completely vanish as the line continues as follows: “Eyed as the Peacock / According to the Human Nerves of Sensation” (257). The pea-

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according to his imagination. He is able to fulfill the task set in the beginning of the poem: “To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes / Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity / Ever expanding in the Bosom of God”.182 Inside and outside cease to be defined by spatial boundaries. The divinity within, inaccessible before, is discovered. Transcendence is immanent.183 There is no particular person left in the end: Man is one and many at the same time as he becomes expanding space. All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all / Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied / Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing / And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality. / And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem.184

Between Poe, Novalis, and Blake The last lines of the poem demonstrate the openness of subject dissolution. Human forms become plants and minerals, die, and dissolve into eternity. There are striking similarities to the notes Novalis made on the second part of Ofterdingen. In addition to the stylistic affinities between Blake and Novalis, which Blake’s friend Charles Augustus Tulk noted as early as 1830,185 comparable processes of becoming are depicted. Similar transformations and a similar spatial dispersion are envisaged. Man can become imperceptible because he has the emanation Jerusalem (or Mathilde) as his access point. Mathilde is already a plant and a mineral and Jerusalem is already an animal (in the illuminations she appears as a winged creature, half human half butterfly) and space. Her second identity as city and her continuing nature enable man’s dissolution in time and space. Without time and space, subjects are free. Without the other, there is no need for systemic and differential identification. Jerusalem is not the other against which the male subject defines himself, she is a part of subjectivity in general that enables sexless man to experience positive subject dissolution. Though clinging to a Christian framework of transcendence, Blake’s poem is in many respects the most radical of the three discussed texts. Semiotically, the poem remains almost opaque. Many voices speak simultaneously. The reader is often unable to identify the speaker or the agent of a sentence. The semiotic structure reflects a multiplicity of paradoxically interrelated subjects that fight, die, return, and change both shape and position throughout the poem. The ending of the song does not signify clocock’s blind eye means the chaos is not organized by human perception. See Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality, 135. 182 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 147. 183 See Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul, 22. 184 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 258f. 185 Paley, The Continuing City ,13. Also see Gerald Eades Bentley, Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) 383.

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sure any more than its continuing form does. Divine unity is a concept that the three texts discussed in this chapter are in the process of replacing or have replaced completely. Divinity does not mean absolute authority in Jerusalem – Jesus is one strong voice among many, including the speaker, who, though rarely surfacing from the multiplicity of different voices, is still a major category. The transcendent real (including the divine subject and the transcendent signifier) is evoked in the poem and the reader is encouraged to believe in it, though semiotically divine unity does not exist.186 In Ofterdingen, perfect artworks equal divine creation. At this point, there seems to be a difference between the poet figures in Ofterdingen and Jerusalem. Despite the resemblance between Los and Jesus, Jesus is still necessary for salvation in Jerusalem. Becoming-woman and becoming-poet suffice in Ofterdingen, while becoming-God is the ultimate limit in Jerusalem. In “The Man of the Crowd”, God seems to have already died. Processes of boundary crossing and elimination are no longer measured against transcendent realms, but are only defined by human multiplicities. The illegibility is expressed through blanks in the text. The limited perspective of the speaker contrasts the breaking of all subject limits of the man of the crowd. The narrator has – like most narrators – an unusual insight into people. He is a semiotic construct, a literary subject at the boundary between information and static noise. Like Ishmael he knows things he could not ordinarily know (the back stories of the passing people), but he also comes up against depths that he cannot penetrate. Speculation and allusion (What kind of sign/subject is the man of the crowd? What is his crime? What does he seek in the crowd?) replace epistemological certainties. Jerusalem performs what is only reflected on in Ofterdingen and “The Man of the Crowd”. It is more radical in this respect because truth and understanding are secondary to becoming-being. Understanding language or nature or the human sign is not the designated goal. Instead, Albion’s becoming-divine in order to enter an eternal state of becoming is foregrounded. Truth is secondary to perception and perception creates reality in eternity. This is why I decided to discuss the three texts in the order of transgression, transcendence, and dissolution. Other sequences are equally feasible. It is also possible to look at the boundary that is crossed or dissolved: God/myth in Jerusalem, nature in Ofterdingen, and society in “The Man of the Crowd”. One could also discuss the texts based on the valence of individuality: selfhood as crime in Jerusalem, fluid selfhood as goal in Ofterdingen, and the negation of selfhood as crime in “The Man of the Crowd”. Depending on the framework, the three texts occupy different positions on a scale of subject a-limitation. From a semiotic point of view, all three texts are concerned with texts: the man of the crowd is compared to an illegible book; Heinrich reads his own (unfinished) story in a book, and Jerusalem is not only a woman, but also the poem itself. Thus, all three texts deal with a textual space that relates to a subject. In semiotic terms, these are uncanny 186

See Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality, 68ff.

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diagrammatic relations. The text equals the subject – but only in a certain respect. The ‘reader-German book’ relation is the same as the ‘narrator-man of the crowd’ relation. The old book is to Heinrich what Ofterdingen is to the reader (an unfinished fragment written long ago about a poet) and reading Jerusalem is to the reader what finding Jerusalem is to Los, the prophet poet. As the reader sets out in search for meaning in the text, Los’s mission is to spatially and linguistically reconstruct and create: “Los built the stubborn structure of the Language”.187 The reader and Los are creating meaning in Jerusalem. As Molly Rothenberg notes, Jerusalem may have moments of transcendence in it, but it does not give the reader access to a transcendental realm.188 Los, the reader’s textual mirror, is unable to rescue Albion by himself and the reader remains caught in semiotic chaos. Travelling, moving through space, and crossing spatial boundaries play a significant role for a-limitation in all three texts. The man of the crowd accelerates and slows down, explores the city like a vampire in search of more life and blood. His traversing of city space is chaotic and erratic. Heinrich has a clear spatial goal (Augsburg), but the spaces he explores in greater depth do not relate to this particular place. They are dream landscapes of his inner exploration. Jerusalem is one of many subjects that are also spaces or places in Jerusalem. Among the many real, mythical, and imaginary cities, London, Golgonooza, and Jerusalem are frequently mentioned and described in greater detail. Their impossible topologies reflect the dynamic constitution of the poem itself and the mode of becoming of its subjects. The next analytic chapter will therefore focus on imaginary and real spaces and their dynamics in Romantic texts.

187 188

Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 183. Rothenberg, Rethinking Blake’s Textuality, 4.

6. Theory Plateau on Subject A-limitation

What is a subject? An introduction through Walt Whitman “What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?”1 asks the speaker in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. This question is an anthropologically universal question that becomes a major concern in Romantic literature. Whitman’s lyrical ‘I’, who calls himself “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, / Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, / No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them”,2 has many answers to this essential question posed in section 20 of his “Song”. With the help of Walt Whitman and Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” (also examined in the two other theoretical plateaus) this chapter attempts to offer one possible answer to this question. In a narrative presenting one perspective on the history of the subject, I trace its development up to and beyond Romanticism in order to show in which ways Romantic texts deterritorialize the subject constructed in previous and later discourses.3 The stages in the development of the subject can serve as a map to a-limitation. The Romantic subject undergoes processes of transgression, transcendence, and dissolution destroying the boundaries created in order to define and distinguish the subject. This

1 2 3

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 44. Ibid., 48. This is one of many possible narratives that neither claims nor attempts completeness or originality. The scholarship on the history of subjectivity or individuality is extensive. I will concentrate on key stages that seem to stand out and focus particularly on Romantic subjectivity. This chapter is mainly informed by Christoph Riedel’s comprehensive history of subjectivity (see Christoph Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum. Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Ich-Begriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989).) and Manfred Frank’s philosophy of subjectivity. Since the issue of subjectivity has received extensive critical attention (particularly for the period of Romanticism), the focus of this chapter of my study is not the generation of new insights in this particular field, but rather findings concerning the interaction between boundary phenomena that a literary subject experiences in relation to space and their semiotic realization in the text.

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means that this theory plateau constitutes a theoretical echo to the preceding analytical chapter, but also a narrative of subject a-limitation in itself. I will begin with Whitman’s paradoxical subject as a prime example of the Romantic subject in general for introductory purposes.4 In the following history of the idea of the subject, I will trace its rise and demise from the beginning to the present implications of extended cognition and the dissolution of the subject in cyberspace. Whitman and Eichendorff serve as one example of the mechanisms of subject a-limitation. Chapter 7 explicitly extends the movement identified in this discussion to its spatial dimension through the discussion of Eichendorff, Smith, and Whitman. Whitman’s self descriptions, manifold as they seem, are all affirmative. The speaker opens confidently with the announcement “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself” in section one. And he fulfils this proclamation and celebrates every fibre of his body and soul in the long poem. “Song of Myself” is a truly American poem full of confidence and self-reliance. The ‘I’, the self, the individual is at the center. It is the ‘I’ that speaks about itself, the ‘I’ that creates and recreates itself in its own words. “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,”5 says the lyrical ‘I’, and this statement is apparently in earnest, for even “[t]he scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer”6 is part of the great celebration of the self. A subject thus celebrated has to be sure of him- or herself. To be conscious or sure of one’s existence as a self is a necessary condition for selfhood that Whitman’s lyrical ‘I’ seems to fulfil. “I know I am solid and sound”,7 he says a few lines after the question, “What am I?” Or further down, “I exist as I am, that is enough.”8 This statement is reminiscent of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. Only Whitman’s self exists unconditionally. In this regard the statement is closer to God’s self-description: I am that I am. The existence of the self (and its song) is proof enough. It seems as if Whitman constructs a subject that is as far from a-limitation as it could be. It is solid, its soul and body are intact, and it enjoys its life thoroughly with all pleasures and pain. Indeed, the speaker calls out: “My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, / I laugh at what you call dissolution”.9 Stronger metaphors of a solid self could hardly be imagined. The great, towering, solid subject, however, has another side to it. It is the interaction between the strong subject and its other side which constitutes the same functional tension I also posit for the Romantic sign. This other side is represented by the other per4

5 6 7 8 9

The paradoxical Romantic subject is a known concept, as Bode points out. I am following his discursive approach in order to explain the subject’s modes of a-limitation and the textual realization of a philosophical discourse. See Christoph Bode, Selbst-Begründungen. Diskursive Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik. I: Subjektive Identität (Trier: WVT, 2008) 7–19. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 49. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 45.

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son in the poem: the ‘you’. The ‘I’ is complemented by a lyrical ‘you’, an addressee or the recipient of the “Song of Myself” which is, consequently, also a song of the ‘you’. The first line in the first stanza is about the self: “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,”10 and the second line incorporates the you: “And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”11 The self and the other are intimately connected by the atom, the (in Whitman’s era) smallest unit in the universe. Everything is composed of the same atoms, universally spreading likeness. Accordingly, the ‘you’ is not only part of the ‘I’ and vice versa, but the ‘you’ is more than a single person – it represents the universe itself. Atomism is a medieval or classical concept that considers the subject to be one thing among many others made of the same material, rather than a single individual.12 This explains why the ‘I’ in “Song of Myself” can see and feel and be so many people and things. Endless lists of occupations and situations are concluded with the words: “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”13 The lyrical ‘I’ swallows everything else, assumes its likeness and fashions a song out of it. A similar process can be observed in the following supplement to the introductory question: “[W]hat am I?”14 The request, “All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, / Else it were time lost listening to me”,15 integrates the other into the song of the self. Not only other people (the addressee, men and women of all classes and all ethnic backgrounds), but also nature is part of the great democratic simultaneity of being and singing. In section 22 the ‘I’ describes how he resigns himself to the sea. The speaker has some understanding of the sea’s wish to feel him. He undresses and swims “out of sight of the land.”16 By crossing the land-sea boundary, the self merges with the element: “I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.”17 The metaphor is taken from the natural sciences. The self dissolves into the water (becomes integral) and assumes its natural qualities: the ability to change its aggregate state from frozen to

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 29. On atomism as part of the history of individuality see Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986) 17. On the modernity of Whitman’s subjectivity in “Song of Myself” see Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’. Zum Menschenbild der Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1996) 126–34. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 41f. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 46.

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liquid to gaseous. It is of all phases. Chapter 7 deals extensively with the variations of Whitman’s spatial a-limitation.18 How can Whitman’s subject be one and many at the same time? How can a subject or a self be at once solid and of all phases? How could someone capable of being of any other person or object in this world laugh at dissolution? The question is how a subject can be so absolute and yet experience such extreme forms of a-limitation at the same time. Whitman offers an answer in section 51: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”19 Contradiction is at the heart of Romantic semiotic a-limitation. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” shows that this contradiction is also part of the Romantic conception of subjectivity. On the one hand there is a strong claim to selfhood. On the other hand, this self dissolves into the masses (also see the discussion of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” in chapter 5) or into nature. The tension or oscillation between these two sides of the subject is central to subject a-limitation because it leads to a continuous transgression, transcendence, or dissolution of boundaries that is followed by a restitution of boundaries and approximates a final limit. As the subject differentiates itself from nature, myth, religion up to the point of its self-positing, it bears within itself the potential for the deterritorialization of these boundaries that occurs particularly frequently in Romantic texts. The ensuing deterritorialization in philosophy (for example Nietzsche), psychology (the divided subject in psychoanalysis), postmodern theory (Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming, the body without organs or the desiring machine), and current discourses on the posthuman (extended mind theory, the subject as pure information) are also used as a heuristic instrument for unveiling Romantic a-limitation phenomena.

The subject as part of larger systems: myth and nature in “Mondnacht” The first side of Whitman’s self is the result of the subject’s long climb to the apex of philosophy and literature which culminates in Romanticism. The concept of the self is not something that can be taken for granted.20 Thinking of individuals as unique beings 18

19 20

Another way of conceptualizing Whitman’s a-limitation fantasies that range from becoming other persons to becoming-animal to becoming-space is the notion of the fold. In his reading of Leibniz, Deleuze describes the fold as the connection between the one and the many, the inside of the monad that encompasses the entire universe. This already points to Whitman’s postmodern potential which appeals to Deleuze. Also see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London and New York: Continuum, 2006). Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 78. Nor is it a stable concept or term. The notion of the self not only has a history, but a conceptual history. It is not surprising that it underwent a significant transformation precisely during the period Koselleck calls the “Sattelzeit” (1750–1800), in which quite a few semantic concepts were estab-

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only became possible at the end of the eighteenth century, namely when Romantic literature and philosophy evolve.21 The birth of the subject, however, takes place in antiquity.22 While the subject is still assimilated into a mythological structure that creates meaning, traces of autonomy are visible in Greek tragedy’s reflective engagement with myth and the pre-Socratic turn to nature. To turn from myth to nature is to turn away from the gods in favor of another superstructure. Myth and the world as cosmos are perceived as closed systems from which the subject can only escape through an act of liberation. If a subject locates its distinctive position in that system by, for example, differentiating between nature and human reason, as Heraclites did, he or she realizes him or herself. This act of self-realization, however, still takes place within a greater mythical order. The same is true for the subject in a worldly structure such as the polis. If the first step to subjectivity is self-realization within a greater structure, the return to such a structure, particularly to myth or nature, could be considered an indicator of an inverse development. The constitution of the subject from myth is reversed as the subject re-enters the mythical or cosmic sphere. If literary subjects are defined by their mythical properties, their self is questioned. They do not exist (in the text) as autonomous beings but as representations of a larger system of meaning-making.23 There are numerous examples of mythical characters in Romantic literature. Chapter 3 discusses Ahab’s mythical background as semiotic a-limitation via intertextuality. Blake also dissolves his subjects into different Christian and Celtic myths. The example presented in the other theory plateaus, Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht”, contains both the

21 22

23

lished or changed. I have used several signifiers interchangeably so far: subject, self, ‘I’, person, individual, and man. While there seems to be no general agreement on the definition of these terms, an awareness of their different implications prevails throughout the publications on subjectivity. See, for example, Stefan Keppler, Grenzen des Ich. Die Verfassung des Subjekts in Goethes Romanen und Erzählungen (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2006) 93, Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp, “Ende des Individuums – Anfang des Individuums? (1984); mit einer kurzen selbstkritischen Nachschrift (1986),” Individualität, eds. Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1988) 3. I will discuss the most common definition which is also used by Manfred Frank. He distinguishes between the individual as a singular entity that is not repeatable and the subject as a being that is conscious of its existence. “‘Subjekt’ (und ‘ich’) meinen ein Allgemeines, ‘Person’ ein Besonderes, ‘Individuum’ ein Einzelnes.” Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, 25. See Frank and Haverkamp, “Ende des Individuums,” 3. Unless indicated otherwise, this short survey of the history of the subject is adapted from Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum. As Keppler points out, the history of subjectivity is not a straightforward evolution (see Keppler, Grenzen des Ich, 14.). The coherent narrative presented in this chapter serves heuristic purposes (providing possible ways of subject a-limitation by looking at historical forms of subjectivity). In fact, the history of subjectivity really seems to follow a trajectory of involution: subjects are constituted and dissolved; one system replaces the other or returns to a former system. Keppler demonstrates this concept for the female characters in Goethe. See Keppler, Grenzen des Ich, 196–220.

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subject’s evolvement from myth and from nature. In the first stanza (“Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel / Die Erde still geküßt, / Daß sie im Blüten-Schimmer / Von ihm nun träumen müßt’”.24 (It seemed as if the sky / Had silently kissed the Earth / So that she, amid glimmering blossoms, / she would now have to dream of him)). As I explained in the theory plateau on semiotic a-limitation, the erotic encounter between the sky and the earth alludes to the myth of Gaia and Uranus. The speaking and perceiving ‘I’ is thus describing a mythical world. In the second stanza, the focus is on nature (“Die Luft ging durch die Felder, / Die Ähren wogten sacht, / Es rauschten leis die Wälder, / So sternklar war die Nacht”.25 (The air went through the fields, / The ears of corn were swaying gently, / The woods were rustling softly / so starlit was the night).) The shift to the indicative in the second stanza points to a more immediate experience. The self, however, speaks from an unclear perspective seemingly perceiving a multiplicity of landscapes at once (fields and woods). This impression of multiplicity is reinforced by the multiplicity of objects: fields, ears of corn, and forests are all in the plural. Is the self still part of this multiplicity or is the multiplicity part of the self? Being one and many at the same time is a recurring theme in Romanticism. It is more explicit in Shelley, Whitman, or Moby-Dick when Neoplatonist notions are reflected upon and integrated into the concept of the self. Questions of the separation of body and soul or mind and soul are addressed, as is the idea of the self containing an entire universe. How appealing these ideas of a self with fragile boundaries or inner divisions can be to those seeking subject a-limitation is shown in Deleuze’s discussion of the Leibnizian monad in The Fold. The self as infinite fold that connects the space of the soul with the space of the material world allows for a renegotiation of subjectivity in favor of the idea of the momentary actualization of a fluid existence.26 Between classical notions of subjectivity and modern approaches lies the medieval period which is significant because Romanticism celebrates medieval literature. Heinrich von Ofterdingen is one example of a medieval setting (Ofterdingen was a medieval poet). The Ossian craze in England and the turn to Romance and pastness in the U.S.A. show that this is a ubiquitous phenomenon. For poets like Novalis the notion of transcendence is also part of an aestheticized version of medieval Catholicism. In the Middle Ages, totality in the shape of myth (Greek gods) or nature (cosmos) is replaced by a Christian system of meaning-making. Man is defined in relation to God. By fulfilling his greater scheme, the subject can realize him- or herself.27

24 25 26 27

Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006) 322. Ibid., 323. See Deleuze, The Fold. Riedel distinguishes between a theological concept and a mystical concept of the medieval self. See Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum, 47–52.

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The last stanza of Eichendorff’s poem (“Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus, / Flog durch die stillen Lande, / Als flöge sie nach Haus”28 (And my soul spread / Its wings widely / flew through the silent countries / As if it were flying home)) could be read as representing the desire for transcendence in the form of a return to God. This reading implies that there is no real subjectivity in Eichendorff’s poem at all. I argue, however, that it is determined by a similar tension of subject-territorialization and deterritorialization to that determining Whitman’s self. In order to illustrate this, I would like to trace the next steps in the history of subjectivity. So far, man has been part of a greater system. Only when man becomes the center of attention in the Renaissance does the subject continue moving towards its status as individual.

Creating the self in Idealism Self-creation as an action finally takes place in Descartes’s famous cogito ergo sum. This sentence is of great importance for the rise of the subject because it depends on self-reflection. Without the cogito, Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which in turn led to German Idealism and theories of the subject, would not have been possible. In Kant’s thought, epistemological problems are no longer assigned to metaphysical truths but have to be filtered through the human mind: “Ich nenne alle Erkenntnis transzendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnisart von Gegenständen, insofern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt.”29 (I call transcendental all cognizance that is not only concerned with objects but also, in general, with our understanding of objects, insofar as this should be possible a priori.) Since everything is filtered through the subject, the subject becomes the center of attention. The subject is the spontaneous act of self-realization on which all understanding is based. Of course, this is a very formal and philosophical definition of subjectivity. Kant’s practical definition of the subject is based on its self-realization and its action within space and time.30 While the anchoring in time and space is the first step on the way from subjectivity to individuality, Kant still considered pure reason to be separate from the individual mind. Johann Gottlieb Fichte attempted to develop a concept of an absolute ‘I’ that encompassed transcendental reason, i.e. the theoretical and practical aspects of subjectivity.31

28 29 30 31

Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, 323. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Nach der ersten und zweiten Originalausgabe, ed. Raymund Schmidt, 3rd ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990) 55*, B25. See Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum, 88ff. See Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 2.

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His aim was to bring “unity and coherence into the entire human being.”32 He did this by proposing in his early work, Wissenschaftslehre,33 that everything is assimilated into the subjective unity, meaning that subjective activity constitutes the conditions under which experience is possible.34 The ‘I’ is “self-grounded, absolute, and unconditionally posited.”35 It is not just Descartes’s principle of cogito, of the ‘I’’s certainty of its existence, it is also the act of self-creation that makes Fichte’s theory so egocentric: “The I posits itself, and it exists by virtue of this mere self-positing.”36 An act of self-intuition constitutes the ‘I’ that then perceives all not-‘I’s through its own reflection. It is crucial that this idea suggests a dynamic and infinite process.37 The ‘I’ posits itself every time it engages in reflection because it always reflects itself. The not-‘I’ or the object is, however, required to establish what an ‘I’ is.38 Again, an ‘other’ (nature, object) is required from which to distinguish the self. This object or not-‘I’ is, however, perceived only through the ‘I’. It could be said that when the ‘I’ becomes an ‘I’, its boundaries are already unstable.39 The idea of self-reflexivity and unity with objects combined with the notion of an absolute self is similar to the Romantic self, characterized as cosmos or as containing multitudes, presented in Whitman’s poem. So far, however, the ‘I’ is still only a subject. It is conscious of itself, has self-determination, and can be distinguished from not-‘I’s. But what about the other ‘I’s, or the other subjects? Only its distinction from other subjects awards each subject individuality. To be an individual also means to be determined by others. This determination can, for instance, be of a moral or a social kind.40 Schlegel describes this last step as the turn from personality to individuality: “Gerade die Individualität ist das Ursprüngliche und

32

33

34 35

36

37 38 39 40

English quotation by ibid., 1. German: “Kurz, es kommt durch dieses System Einheit und Zusammenhang in den ganzen Menschen, die in so vielen Systemen fehlen.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Ed. Wilhelm G. Jacobs. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997) 212. Fichte’s later philosophical works are much more practical, but they had very little influence on subsequent philosophy. Novalis, Schelling, Hölderlin, and even Hegel only read the early works. See Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity 7, Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum, 106. See Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity, 39. Ibid., 43. German: “Demnach ist das schlechthin Gesetzte, und auf sich selbst Gegründete – Grund eines gewissen […] Handelns des menschlichen Geistes…”. Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 15f. Translation by Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity, 45. German: “Also das Setzen des Ich durch sich selbst ist die reine Tätigkeit desselben. – Das Ich setzt sich selbst, und es ist, vermöge dieses bloßen Setzens durch sich selbst”. Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 16. It is Fichte’s idea that the ‘I’ is part of a circle which is an infinite product engaged in infinite action. The only boundary is set by the ‘I’ and can be moved into infinity. See Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity, 50. Also see Novalis’s critique of Fichte discussed in chapter 5. Fichte develops such a principle of positing through the other on the basis of morals in his later works. See Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum, 103ff.

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Ewige im Menschen; an der Personalität ist so viel nicht gelegen.”41 (Individuality is the original and eternal element of human nature; personality is not that significant.) With Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Schelling the rise of the subject finally reached its peak in the notion of individuality. Charles Taylor calls this development the “expressivist turn”: “Expressivism was the basis for a new and fuller individuation. This is the idea which grew in the late eighteenth century that each individual is different and original, and that this originality determines how he or she ought to live.”42 This expressivism can easily be seen in Romantic literature’s focus on the self. That is why the expressivist turn has also been called a ‘lyrical turn’, a turn that locates the self at the center of the text.43 Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is an extreme example. Many other poems also contain a dominant lyrical ‘I’. Wordsworth’s most famous poem, which is often read for his poetics of emotion combined with reflection, starts with the line “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.44 His long autobiographical poem Prelude is entirely devoted to the life of a lyrical ‘I’ who is constantly reinventing himself. In a letter to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth comments on Prelude, saying that it is “unprecedented in Literary History that a man should talk so much of himself.”45 The lyrical ‘I’ is omnipresent in US American and English as well as in German poetry. Expressivism expands into other genres as well. Moby-Dick is narrated by Ishmael in the first person; Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is also written in the first person. Frame narratives (for example in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer), inserted narratives (for example E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder) or short stories by Poe are framed as personal accounts. A complete list would be as overwhelming as is Whitman’s catalogue of the shapes his self can assume. Why do I claim that subject a-limitation is constitutive of Romantic literature if the individual has such a strong presence in Romantic texts? The answer lies in the nature of the selves presented in the texts in question. The peak of the subject as individual is also the starting point of its disintegration.46 I suggest reading Eichendorff’s poem as 41

42 43 44 45

46

Friedrich Schlegel, “Ideen,” Athenaeum. Vol. 3, eds. Friedrich Schlegel and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Reprint ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983) 15. Also see Cornelia Klinger, Flucht – Trost – Revolte. Die Moderne und ihre ästhetischen Gegenwelten (München and Wien: Hanser, 1995) 29f. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 375. Christoph Reinfandt, Englische Romantik. Eine Einführung (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2008) 24. For a discussion of this poem in the context of subjectivity see ibid., 39ff. Quoted in Wolfgang G. Müller, “Das Problem der Subjektivität in der Lyrik der englischen Romantik,” Eine andere Geschichte der englischen Literatur. Epochen, Gattungen und Teilgebiete im Überblick, ed. Ansgar Nünning, WVT-Handbücher zum Literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996) 135. See Roland Hagenbüchle, “Subjektivität. Eine historische-systematische Hinführung,” Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivität. Vol. 1, eds. Reto Luzius Fetz, et al. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1998) 45.

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the depiction of this moment between self and deterritorialization by taking a closer look at the speaker. The poem has three stanzas devoted to different scenarios. It starts with an unidentified speaker (no personal pronouns are given) describing the atmosphere of the moonlit night as a romantic encounter between earth and sky, or the mythical space of Gaia and Uranus. The second stanza is devoted to nature: air, fields, crops, woods, and stars. The mythical system is replaced by nature as cosmos. It is not until the third stanza that the ‘I’, in the shape of the personal pronoun, finally makes its entrance, which is, at the same time its exit. The moment it calls itself ‘I’ (“meine Seele [my emphasis]”) it is no longer a unified subject. The soul leaves the body and the mind of the speaker in order to fly through nature and thus return to the cosmos. This return is prefigured in the mythical system in the first stanza as well as in the natural system in the second stanza. I propose to read these two stanzas as two stages in the history of the subject. Greek myth as the first stage is followed by the experience of nature as the next step in the process of individuation. When the subject appears it is still a divided subject (soul and something that is left behind). Through its soul, which is figured as the link to the higher system (myth, nature, God), the subject is partially reintegrated before it can become an individual. In a way, the poem represents the historical reality of the subject when it finally becomes an individual in Romanticism: it dissolves in a transcendent act at the moment of triumph.

The Romantic subject and its becomings The emergence of the subject as individual in (philosophical) history is the beginning of its end.47 Following its descent into Postmodernism, one encounters Schopenhauer, who sees hope in the individual’s abandonment of the egocentric and self-reflexive position, and Nietzsche, who turns the mind/body dichotomy around in favor of the body. The bodily subject is thought of as a genius that transgresses all boundaries and emancipates itself from constant self-reflection.48 Whitman’s insistence on the body as a necessary aspect of the celebrated self anticipates this turn towards bodily existence.49 With the

47 48 49

See Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum, 124. See ibid., 130–38. In “Starting from Paumanok” Whitman stresses the importance of the body even more: “Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, / and includes and is the soul;” Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 25.

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ascription of the superhuman, the subject is on its way to losing its determining characteristic: self-awareness via self-reflection. The idea of genius, the superhuman, or the creative mind, which is also a prominent feature in literature and philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century (the German period Sturm und Drang), is closely connected to the subject’s dissolution. To be an individual means to be a singular entity bound by time, space, and individual deficiencies. It also entails being subjected to various contingencies. To be an individual means to suffer from restrictions, restrictions that hinder creativity. Schlegel’s solution to the restrictions placed on the individual mind reads as follows: [K]ein Mensch [ist] schlechthin nur ein Mensch […] sondern zugleich auch die ganze Menschheit […]. Darum geht der Mensch, sicher sich selbst immer wieder zu finden, immer von neuem aus sich heraus, um die Ergänzung seines innersten Wesens in der Tiefe eines fremden zu suchen und zu finden.50 (No human being is just one human being but at the same time also all of humanity. That is why man, knowing that he will find himself again, leaves his self again and again in order to find a complement for his innermost being in the depth of the other.)

That is why the Romantic subject simultaneously affirms and denies its individuality. Keats, when arguing against Wordsworth’s writing about himself (Keats calls Wordsworth’s Prelude the “egoistical sublime”), strips the poet of any individuality: As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical Sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself – it has no self – It is every thing and nothing […]. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity – he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun, – the Moon, – the Sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none […]51

50

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Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005) 166f. Michael Neumann argues that Schlegel’s idea of the mind without limits is similar to Hegel’s. See Michael Neumann, “Grenzauflösung. Die Urhandlung der deutschen Romantik,” Subversive Romantik, eds. Volker Kapp, et al. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2004) 329. Cf. Frank and Haverkamp, “Ende des Individuums,” 4f. Neumann explores different ways of realizing this aporia: friendship and love (particularly in the shape of symphilosophy and sympoesy) and literature (particularly in the shape of irony and fragmentation). Neumann considers this project of “Grenzauflösung” to be a failure because it also produces uncanny figures such as ghosts, doppelgängers, and mystic creatures. My concept of a-limitation includes these motifs as transgressive a-limitation without assigning any value to them. John Keats in a letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818); John Keats, The Complete Works. Vol.4, ed. Buxton Forman (Glasgow: Gowars & Gray, 1901) 173. On Keats and subjectivity see: Christoph Bode, “Das Subjekt in der englischen Romantik,” Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der Subjektivität. Vol.2, eds. Reto Luzius Fetz, et al., (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1998) 881–84. If the poet is empty, he can also deal with contradiction, doubt, and mystery. He has, as Keats puts it, “Negative Capability”. Coleridge’s theory of imagination contains similar ideas.

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Of course, this is an extreme position that anticipates modern ideas of the poet as catalyst. Broadly speaking, Romantic poetry both expresses individual thoughts and surpasses limits in its desire for compatibility, universality, and totality.52 Individuality, though it cannot be entirely erased, can never be a principle because it binds the subject in too many ways.53 The shedding of individuality demonstrates that ‘subject’ is an appropriate term for Romantic conceptions of the self. Since these subjects wish to erase their individuality, the term subject serves as an adequate concept for analysis. The term also leads to Modernist as well as Postmodernist ideas of subjectivity. A holistic subject is hard to find (even in antiquity the soul and mind or body and soul are conceived as two distinct entities). The closer the recounting of the history of the subject moves towards the more recent poststructuralist and deconstructivist claims of the end of the subject, the more divided the subject becomes. Twentieth-century concepts of subjectivity are influenced by psychoanalysis and by the idea of the linguistic determination of the subject.54 The subject preserves its division (soul/body, self/other) in the shape of different categories of division (for example id, ego, superego). This subject is never the same and experiences constant lack, which it attempts to compensate. While Fichte’s absolute ‘I’ may be restricted by its dependency on the not-‘I’ to constitute itself, and while it may strive for some kind of metaphysical totality, the modern and postmodern subject cannot create or even know itself. On the contrary, it is governed by drives and wishes that it cannot control and is created entirely by the other. The longing for totality has been the subject’s desire ever since Plato’s fable of the divided man. In Romanticism, totality is associated with divinity and transcendence but also with systems such as myth and nation.55 In the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, for 52

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Hagenbüchle explains this concept with the help of the ambivalent nature of the fragment as a genre that is at the same time finished and open. See Hagenbüchle, “Subjektivität. Eine historischsystematische Hinführung,” 44–56. Riedel has a similar argument but claims that the analysis of the dissolution of the self in Romanticism is restricted to a few “impulses” that are working hard to make their point plausible. In the tradition of Frank and Menninghaus (See Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdoppelung. Die frühromantische Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987).) I hope to add to this argument. See. Riedel, Subjekt und Individuum, 135. Rough translation of Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, 16. As this study is not based on psychoanalytic theories of the subject, I will only mention basic concepts. For a discussion of psychoanalysis in subject-theory and semiotics see: Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford and New York: University Press, 1983), Gabriele Schwab, Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen. Zur Subjektivität im modernen Roman (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1987). Reinfandt’s idea of subjectivity and the desire for totality suggests that this desire is directed towards concepts of state, nation, and people and finds its literary equivalents in the continuation of folk literature, fairytales, genres such as the ballad, and the call for simple language. See Reinfandt, Englische Romantik, 24–30

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example, it is above all the desire to have both sexes. While this desire seems to be fulfilled in the moment of sexual encounter, androgyny is another possible way of compensating the lack and this can also frequently be found in Romantic literature: from Schlegel’s Lucinde, Eichendorff’s cross-dressings, and Blake’s ambiguous gender constructions to Whitman’s embrace of all genders and sexualities, Romantic texts attempt to overcome the division or the boundaries between men and women.56 Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis continues to question gender boundaries by suggesting alternative models for desire, models which do not depend on the notion of lack or the compatibility of male and female reproductive organs.57 Nonhuman sex and desiring machines shift the focus from wholeness as the aim of the divided subject to multiplicity. Instead of a subject experiencing lack and longing for wholeness, they celebrate the body without organs or the subject that is becoming: This passage [from the partial object to the complete one] implies a subject, defined as a fixed ego of one sex or the other, who necessarily experiences as a lack his subordination to the tyrannical complete object. This is perhaps no longer the case when the partial object is posited for itself on the body without organs, with – as its sole subject – not an ‘ego,’ but the drive that forms the desiring machine along with it, and that enters into relationships of connection, disjunction, and conjunction with other partial objects, at the core of the corresponding multiplicity whose every element can only be defined positively.58

Instead of unity, they propose infinite multiplicity in infinite combinations. Instead of a molar existence, they propose a molecular one (a subject divided into many molecules). For this reason, the Oedipal family (father, mother, child) is just a cultural construct that perpetuates notions of lack. Instead disjunctions (I can either be a father or a child) should not be exclusive but allow for different positions in systems. The subject as individual is only a by-product of desire that emerges at the moment of connection, but immediately changes again.59 In this system, the body without organs does not mean the dissolution of the body per se (a taking out of the organs and killing of the body), but the deterritorialization of its 56

57 58 59

On gender ambiguity and Lucinde see, for instance, Neumann, “Grenzauflösung,” 330f. Contrary to Neumann I would argue that this is not a case of destroying gender boundaries, but one of transgression. Transgression in its approximate nature does not mean the dissolution of boundaries. This becomes apparent when looking at the entire story told in Lucinde. Julius deals with several stereotypical women before he merges with Lucinde. This (gender) unity, however, does not last long. She soon turns into his muse and after that into his wife who is supposed to look after their child in a very traditional arrangement. Nevertheless, I adhere to MacLeod’s claim that Lucinde is “the quintessential novel of androgyny.” Macleod also argues that androgyny and form are linked through the fragment and the arabesque. Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity. Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998) particularly 66–91, 67. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). Ibid., 68. See ibid., 44.

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organism or its organization. It is, however, “a model of death” because it is chiefly concerned with change or becoming.60 According to Deleuze and Guattari, death is “what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming – in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc”.61 In all of the analytical chapters I discuss different kinds of becomings. The connection between the dissolution of gender boundaries, death, and becoming, implicit in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, is a form of subject a-limitation that seems to be a strong phenomenon in Romanticism (see the discussions of Ofterdingen, Jerusalem, Charlotte Smith’s poetry, and Marmorbild). Culturally, death and woman are deeply connected as Elisabeth Bronfen shows in Over Her Dead Body. They are both subjected to a similar tension between confirmation and destabilization, or wholeness and lack (psychoanalytically this means the mother as unit before birth and as castrated man), presence and absence, true signification and self-referentiality.62 This tension is very similar to the tension that defines processes of a-limitation. Unsurprisingly, they become virulent as Romanticism approaches. Bronfen (drawing on Foucault and Ariés) explains the changing connotations of death in the eighteenth century with the notion of subjectivity: individualism and a heightened focus on the self lead to a “duplicitous mixture of fear and fascination”.63 In her analysis of the aesthetic representations of dying or dead women, Bronfen demonstrates how the female body can function as a cultural imaginary for otherness and ungraspable experience. This is perhaps why Deleuze and Guattari understand becoming-woman as the first stage of all becomings.64 Becoming-woman encompasses the possibilities of change, tension, and fluidity. In Bronfen’s analysis, woman is not only connected to death but also to the sign. Her fluidity is arrested in the portrait or the poem. The woman becomes a body or a corpse and finally a sign. My readings of becoming-woman in Romantic texts show that woman is already a semiotic being, an image or a symbolic sign that holds the promise of meaning but refuses to be deciphered. For Deleuze and Guattari becoming-sign is not desirable as they associate signification and subjectification with semiosis. Becoming-woman, becoming-plant, and in the

60 61 62

63 64

Ibid., 362. Ibid., 363. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. Death, Feminity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) 11, 29, 33, 84. Stefan Keppler also posits a similar connection between the dissolution of the subject, female characters in Goethe, their proximity to nature, their crises of articulation, and their sympathy with death. See Keppler, Grenzen des Ich, 3. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 85. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 174.

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end becoming-imperceptible means to be asignifying. Precisely because the women in the Romantic texts are engaged in semiotic a-limitation (and therefore do not signify), they provide a point of access for the male subject to engage in a-limitation. The becoming-sign in Romantic texts seems to express a very high level of a-limitation. Becoming-sign entails infinite possibilities of existence.

Becoming-sign and becoming-posthuman As a result of the link between becoming a body without organs (feeling death), becoming-woman, and becoming-sign, I would like to propose that at the end of the subject’s dissolution following Romanticism stands the subject as signifier, the linguistic or semiotic subject. The notions of linguistic determination and the disappearance of the subject into language are already part of Peirce’s semiotics.65 Peirce assumes that language is part of or even constitutes the subject. He integrates man into his universe of unlimited semiosis. According to Peirce, humans may have real experiences, but their knowledge (including the knowledge about themselves) is always indirect and mediated through signs. In this respect, Peirce can be seen as working in the Idealist or reflective tradition. In volume V of his Collected Papers he writes: “Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought.”66 The interpretant who creates a new sign from every sign is defined by his thought processes which are themselves signs. Therefore he is an eternal sign, too. The subject is consequently a user of signs, but at the same time, it is the product of the semiotic process. Through being a sign, the subject is connected to all other signs and thus to all other subjects. Peirce does not deny the existence of dualities (self and other), but he privileges the notion of everything as continuity or thirdness. Therefore, the self and the other are never entirely exclusive: “All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being.”67 A view like this cannot affirm individuality: “personal existence

65

66

67

In my explanations of the linguistic subject I draw on two monographs. I do not discuss Benveniste, whose ideas were very influential in semiotics and who informed Deleuze and Guattari’s argument on different regimes of signs as much as Peirce did. For a more detailed commentary on Benveniste and Peirce see the first chapter in Silverman, Subject of Semiotics. For an extensive discussion of Peirce and subjectivity see Vincent Michael Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self. A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 5. Pragmantism and Pragmaticism, eds. Charles Hartshore and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 189. (CP 5.314) Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.Vol. 7 and 8. Science and Philosophy. Reviews, Correspondence, and Bibliography, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966) 346. (CP 7.572)

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is an illusion and a practical joke”,68 writes Peirce. To see subjectivity as a product of semiosis and as part of a continuum also implies a dynamic notion of the subject. Again, the subject keeps changing. It changes with every new sign and every element in the chain of signifiers. It is constituted and dissolved by language. This fluid existence makes man creative: Having surrendered to the power of nature, and having allowed the futile ego in some measure to dissolve, man at once finds himself in synectic union with the circumambient non-ego, and partakes in its triumphs. On the simple condition of obedience to the laws of nature, he can satisfy many of his selfish desires; a further surrender will bring him the higher delight of realizing to some extent his ideas; a still further surrender confers upon him the function of cooperating with nature and the course of things to grow new ideas and institutions.69

The union with the non-ego is a Romantic idea. Indeed, traces of American transcendentalism can be found in Peirce’s works, along with frequent mentions of Hegel.70 The Romantic trajectory of semiotics is radicalized with the advent of poststructuralism and deconstructivism. These movements deny a transcendental signified (like God) as well as the notion of the subject as self-defined entity by dissolving it into the text a. The ascent towards the apex of subjectivity started in systems (myth, nature, religion), continued with reflective settings of the self, peaked with the idea of individuality, and started its descent with the increasing division and determination of the subject through the other and through language. In “The Thought of the Outside” Foucault describes a “language spoken by no one: any subject it may have is no more than a grammatical fold”.71 The subject is a by-product of language or a flickering of subjectivity at the moment a pronoun is used. In Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of desire and becoming, this form of uncertain and fleeting subjectivity becomes a positive goal, just as it was in Romanticism. The speaker in Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht” is one such case of a flickering subject that briefly manifests itself through language (via the pronouns) only to disappear into transcendent space. Ishmael’s schizonarration (see chapter 3) is another example of a flickering semiotic subject. In a wave-like movement, Ishmael’s subjectivity washes in and out of the text.72 68

69

70 71

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Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 4. The Simplest Mathematics, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 45. (CP 4.68) Charles Sanders Peirce, Contributions to the Nation 1890–1893, eds. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1975) 188f. Quoted in Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self, 96. See Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self, 65. Michel Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” trans. Robert Hurley, The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998) 166. On the dispersal of specifically literary subjects in the text see, for example, Keppler, Grenzen des Ich, 71f. I do not treat ‘real’ and ‘literary’ subjects differently because the ‘real’ subject is also lin-

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The disappearance of the subject into language constitutes a preliminary end-point in the history of subjectivity. Consequently, it is also the highest form of subject a-limitation in this particular narrative because contemporary theories of extended cognition or the posthuman are informed by the idea that the subject will become digital and will be linked to the machine.73 Nancy Katherine Hayles’s discussion of subjectivity in the age of cybernetics suggests that the boundary between man and machine (rather than that between man and myth, man and nature, etc.) is now being challenged: “In the posthuman, there is no essential difference or absolute demarcation between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals”.74 The challenge to the autonomous subject is no longer merely the binary opposition between presence and absence, but that between pattern and randomness.75 The subject becomes a flickering signifier in danger of disappearing into the flow of information where it might turn into random noise. In her analysis of different literary texts dealing with posthuman forms of existence, Hayles shows that being drawn into virtual reality and becoming-sign can be both pleasurable and terrifying. While there are new forms of boundary crossing, the mechanism of tension and oscillation, which I posited for a-limitation, and the three dimensions involved (sign, subject, and space) are still visible in theories of posthuman subjectivity. According to

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guistically constructed and dispersed. If the reader has to reconstruct the literary subject through putting together bits and pieces of information from the text (character, appearance, past, etc.), the ‘real’ subject is also reconstructed by other humans in the process of getting to know a person and retrieving additional information. It could be argued that the literary subject is more limited (by textual boundaries), but the ‘real’ subject can also refuse to give information. I do not attempt to define the literary subject. Instead, the assumption that literary subjects are concerned in the analyzed texts is supported by their forms of semiotic a-limitation, including the dispersion of the literary subject through intertexts or myths and its general semiotic constitution. For heuristic reasons I would like to posit the textual actual world and its possible worlds as the textual reality and analyze the subject a-limitation of its subjects bearing their status as literary subjects in mind without particularly emphasizing this ontological status. For a theory of literary subjects see Fotis Jannidis, Figur und Person. Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2004). This is, of course, a very recent trend. There are various philosophical theories of the individual, subject, or person by Tugendhat or Henrichs complementing Frank’s defence of the subject after Postmodernism. For a survey of different perspectives on individuality or subjectivity see Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp, eds., Individualität (München: Fink, 1988). For remarks on the role of language in analytic philosophy see Frank and Haverkamp, “Ende des Individuums,” 12. For the posthuman subject that merges with the computer see the works of Nancy Katherine Hayles, who analyzes the interaction between information technology and literary discourses. Nancy Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Nancy Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. Ibid., 247ff.

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Hayles, the history of the posthuman culminates in the idea of the human being as pure information (being thus compatible to artificial intelligence). Hayles, however, contests that information still needs a carrier or a medium to be transmitted and that there are therefore limits to the integration between human beings and machines. This returns the body to its flickering signifiers. Six years later (2005) Hayles published a second book on the topic (My Mother Was a Computer) in which she revises this point by dissolving the boundary between disembodied information and embodied humans and looks at digital subjects and the tension between simulation and narration. The material environment, however, still allows boundaries that resist the complete dissolution of subjectivity.76 This challenge to the human as a sign shows that a-limitation is not just the crossing but also the constant restitution of boundaries and that it has revolved around very similar problems ever since Romanticism. Whitman’s question could be answered with the help of the body (you are an embodied person) or with the help of information (you are a text that spreads into multiple subjectivities and spaces). While Whitman’s speaker is not afraid of merging, a-limitation was an ambivalent experience in Romanticism, and still is in the posthuman age. It can be transcendent and desired (“Mondnacht”, Ofterdingen), but it can also be transgressive (“The Man of the Crowd”, Ahab in MobyDick, Charlotte Smith’s Sonnett XLIV). A-limitation cannot only result in boundary crossings, but also in merges and dissolutions that are active and positive (Leaves of Grass), as well as passive and frightening (Jerusalem). While chapter 5 deals with the detailed discussion of transcendent, transgressive, and dissolutive subject a-limitation, this theoretical plateau provides one (of many) possible narratives of the history of subjectivity. By portraying the subject’s evolvement into a self and its immediate dissolution, I would like to offer a plethora of possibilities of subject a-limitation which I cannot discuss in detail in the analytical chapters. This narrative of subjectivity paints a subject that has and will always remain elusive (in this sense humans have always been posthuman), or as Whitman writes: “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”77

76 77

See the introductory chapter of Hayles, My Mother was a Computer, 1–11. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 79.

7. Spatial Boundaries

From sign to subject to space: Jerusalem’s journey Entering the book The analytic chapter on subject boundaries (chapter 5) begins its discussion of Jerusalem with a short description of the poem at the beginning of its chapter 1 on plate four, but the textual space of the book expands beyond those words into the preface and beyond the preface into the frontispiece and title page. The first plate displays a man entering a building or a city through a wooden door. A proof copy reveals that there used to be, on the archway, writing about Los who enters the Door of Death for Albion’s sake.1 Is the man Los? Or is he someone else? He could also be the reader who enters the poem. This first plate already sets the reader an iconic riddle. In the first section of this chapter I would like to take a closer look at the semio-spatial organization of the illuminated book. It is a complex poem, a woman, and a city, as several critics have pointed out.2 Jerusalem/Jersualem is the perfect triad of sign (poem), subject (woman), and space (city). So far, I have focused primarily on the concepts of subjectivity in the poem in general and of Jerusalem in particular. There is no a priori assumption of subjectivity in Jerusalem. Subjects are partial and divided from the beginning. A coherent self is neither attained nor aspired to. If subject, semiotic, and spatial a-limitation are interdependent, the dissolution of the subject in favor of a concept of multiplicity in unity should also be detectable in the text and in the way space is depicted. As the previous chapter shows, Jerusalem eludes many semiotic conventions starting with genre and culminating in ambiguous grammatical structures. Multiple identities correspond to multiple voices and utterances that are not assignable to (grammatical) persons. Space is a similarly complicated matter 1 2

See the textual notes in William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988) 809. Recent examples are Jennifer Davis Michael, Blake and the City (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006) 162, Robert N. Essick, “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 260.

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because of the juxtaposition of real, mythical, and fictional spaces and the explicit merging of subject and space. This chapter explores spatial processes of boundary crossing and elimination in different texts. In the first section, I continue the discussion of Jerusalem concentrating on the aspect of textual space. By taking up the argument from chapter 3 (Semiotic Boundaries), the idea of the Romantic text as rhizome-book is further developed. The second section moves from the meta-level of the book as space to space on the level of content by discussing Eichendorff’s Taugenichts as a subject between smooth and striated space. Charlotte Smith’s poems, which are discussed in the third section, employ different, more radical strategies for smoothing space that resemble the annihilation of the molar subject in smooth space more closely. While the Taugenichts stabilizes his identity by binding himself to territories and by engaging in processes of reterritorialization, Smith’s subjects are magically drawn to the prototypically smooth space of the sea where they attempt to shed their corporal, solid existence. But they are also part of the aesthetic, scientific, and cultural discourses of the sea at the turn of the century. This is why in the two middle sections not only space, but also place as concrete location and the effects of environmental changes on the latter play a part. Finally, the chapter concludes with an approximation of the limit in Walt Whitman’s frontier texts, which go one step further by imagining death as the space beyond the limit and subjects as absolute multiplicity. Whitman’s poems focus on space (sea, prairie, and city) and his major work, Leaves of Grass, is also a spatialized book. The last section of this chapter thus finishes where the chapter started: with the book as rhizomatic space.

Blake’s method of production and the poetics of Jerusalem Whitman’s notion of multiplicity is decidedly different from Blake’s concept of multiple subjects, but there are similarities that justify using one term for both their spatial constructions. Both Whitman and Blake play with the text as space. Jerusalem is presented on plates and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to which I will return at the end of the Whitman section, on paper leaves. Blake’s method of composition and the combination of text and image add further levels to his text that begins not with letters, but with the image of a man crossing a threshold. Following the man, who might be Los, the reader is struck by the next full-page design: a colorful title page. Around the letters, several lepidopterous women are grouped – women who are becoming-animal. The reader has entered into a fantastic world and yet she encounters cities with familiar names (London, Cambridge, and Oxford for example). The next page, featuring illustrations of similar animal-human forms in its margins, constitutes an address to the public by what seems to be an author-narrator, a narrator who is aware that he is writing for an audience and who stylizes himself as the author of the text. Moby-Dick’s narrator Ishmael presents himself in a similar fashion and encounters comparable difficulties.

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Blake’s narrator hopes that he will be able to please his reader with this new “Giant form []” and asks her, “Therefore [Dear] Reader, [forgive], what you do not approve, & [love] me for this energetic exertion of my talent.”3 The italics and parentheses used in this quotation indicate that Blake changed the sentence. The final version does not include the parenthetical phrases. This omission contradicts the poetics proclaimed in Jerusalem. In the address “To the Public” on the third plate, the author-narrator explains that “this Verse was first dictated” to him, but that he changed the verse by adding rhymes and variations in the length of lines, cadence, and number of syllables.4 He continues to assert: “Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place”.5 First of all, the author-narrator therefore defies the authority of the divine logos, the voice that dictated the poem to him (and mocks the aesthetic conventions of his contemporaries), by changing the poem’s form and structuring it in what he considers a more aesthetically pleasing fashion. The poem’s ensuing superiority is derived from variation and the harmony of form and content: “the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts – the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other”.6 This new system is important because entire nations depend on the quality of their poetry. After such a claim, the reader expects a harmonious and well-structured poem. From the analysis of subjectivity in Jerusalem we know that this expectation is disappointed. Not only does Jerusalem resist order, the reader also looks in vain for mild sections within it. Jerusalem is a rough text.7 A more striking contradiction is inherent in the claim that every word and letter has its place and in the fact that Blake published different versions of Jerusalem and his other illuminated books. In this regard, Blake’s books are of a very particular nature. The quotation from the address to the reader in Jerusalem serves as an example to illustrate this: “Therefore [Dear] Reader, [forgive], what you do not approve, & [love] me for this energetic exertion of my talent.”8 The words “Dear”, “forgive”, “love” cannot be found in any copy of Jerusalem. Instead, there are blank spaces that show traces of their erasure. Apparently, not every word and letter has its place in the poem. The sentence does not even make sense without the missing words, which is why later editors have filled in the blanks on the basis of the original plates. Of course, there are speculations about personal reasons for the deletion – perhaps Blake erased the terms 3 4 5 6 7

8

Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 145. Ibid., 145f. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 146. Robert Essick summarizes a number of problematic methods of meaning-making and suggests semantic clusters as an alternative. Despite ongoing attempts at interpretation, Jerusalem remains an enigmatic text. Essick even warns the reader: “And let us not even try to grasp Jerusalem the way we can at least pretend to understand Wordsworth or Dickens”. Essick, “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” 252. Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 145.

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out of disappointment with his readers.9 Still, there are other major changes that contradict his claim of order. Jerusalem is a poem that consists of 100 plates divided into four chapters. There are several copies of the book and two main versions, which are called the first order and the second order because the order of the plates in chapter 2 was altered in some of the copies. Furthermore, there is just one colored copy, but even the black and white copies differ in design. Blake added figures and shadows and deleted others. Each copy differs in details from the others, meaning that all of them are different texts. Blake used a technique called relief-etching. He drew designs and wrote text with acid-resistant ink on copper plates. Viscomi proves that Blake did not sketch his plates beforehand, which means that the processes of perception, invention, and production are not separated.10 Instead of the usual Romantic mode of reflection (seeing a field of daffodils and then going home to safely arrest nature in a process of reflection), contingency plays a great role in Blake’s productive process. Instead of experiencing nature (the notorious golden daffodils in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”) and reflecting upon it prior to the act of poetic creation, Blake immediately turns thought into matter. The next step was to etch away the copper not protected by resistant ink or wax, clean the plates, spread ink on the surface, and print the page on paper. During this process, accidents and irregularities added further contingency to the text. Then Blake would water-color the designs and sometimes even the text in layers. Each copy of an illuminated book is therefore a unique palimpsest composed of different layers and representing different stages in the creative process.

Blake and Deleuze: radicle- and rhizome-books Over the years, Blake reprinted his books several times, changing colors, designs, words, and the order of the plates so that there are overt differences between copies from different periods. In a way, Jerusalem is a prototypical open work in two senses: First, Blake’s books seem to have been in a continuous state of becoming. Second, his books also challenge the reader to choose between orders and make sense of the different possible meanings. Or, to radicalize this claim: they challenge order and meaning in general. Jerusalem as a textual space seems to resemble what Deleuze and Guattari call a “rhizome-book”. 9

10

See Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 339. The following description of the different copies is also taken from Viscomi’s illuminating study. See Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing,” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 42. For a more comprehensive overview on the production process also see the article by Viscomi. Blake and the Idea of the Book explains in detail the methods Viscomi used to reconstruct Blake’s production processes.

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The rhizome-book as a spatial metaphor for textual construction is a Romantic space I began to discuss in chapter 3. Heinrich encounters this type of open book in the cave and Ishmael reflects on the rhizomatic nature of his proliferating text. Ishmael attempts to write a root-book, hierarchically ordered like a tree with a trunk, branches, and twigs that provide the reader with a sense of orientation. His aim is to tell the truth in an orderly manner. He wants each word and letter to have a place that makes sense in the book. Yet, there is also the opposite desire: not to finish the book, and to write it in a disorderly manner that disregards the alleged need for imitation and representation. Torn between the two semiotics of Romanticism – the oscillation between meaning and endless signification – Ishmael produces a textual space with rhizomatic elements. His inability to decide on his own status as narrating and experiencing self means he appears and disappears in the text (schizonarration). Beginning the book with the idea that every letter has its place is also suggestive of a root-book structure. The author-narrator of Jerusalem, however, writes a rhizome-book organized into plateaus. Even if the difference between the existing versions of the text is attributed to the author, Blake, instead of to the author-narrator of the poem, the author-narrator is still responsible for the order of the plates and their content in each individual copy. Even under this premise, Jerusalem still has rhizomatic qualities. First of all, the spatial orientation of the book is striking. Jerusalem is a city, and it is not the only one: London, Golgonooza, Babel, and numerous other real, invented, and biblical cities occupy the space of the city poem. There are detailed and illogical descriptions of Golgonooza. There are other spaces as well: for example the vales of Beulah, the vegetative universe, the mundane shell, and abstract spaces such as reason and desire, which – to make the situation more complex – are also depicted in the illuminations. Reason as one pole of a globe and desire as the other on plate 54 is just one example of the spatial depiction of ideas.11 Space is an organizing principle in Blake’s book that simultaneously defies organization by establishing the opposition of within and without, directions, and boundaries only to deconstruct them. Jerusalem, London, and Golgonooza exist simultaneously; they are different plateaus of one rhizomatic structure that comprises a map with multiple entry ways.12 11 12

William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2000) 351. Different critics chose to enter this map from different directions and move around it differently. As a result, the interpretations range from biblical, philosophical, and semantic approaches to discussions in intermedia studies and Poststructuralist theories and finally to specifically spatial readings of movement in the city. Blake scholarship has come a long way from the imposition of structures on the text (four ages of men, different religions, Four Zoas, etc.) to more open, Structuralist readings that acknowledge the unusual narrative structure but still search for an underlying system. See, for example, Stuart Curran, “The Structure of Jerusalem,” Blake’s Sublime Allegory. Essays on The Four Zoas Milton Jerusalem, eds. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Jr. Wittreich (London and Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) 329–346. Beginning roughly in the late 1980s with a collection of articles on Blake that use Poststructuralist theory, scholarship started to estab-

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Forming different knots and bulbs, the rhizome is heterogenetic and does not have a top, a bottom, a left or a right side. It continually grows, is cut, and grows back again just like Albion and Jerusalem die, come to life again, are rebuilt, conquered, killed, and finally annihilated to lead a different kind of existence. In the mode of becoming, the chronology and the narrative progression of a root-book are not important. Instead, the rhizome-book can be read in an a-chronological fashion, perhaps, as Deleuze and Guattari advise for their own (rhizomatic) book A Thousand Plateaus, looking at the introduction first and at the ending last but otherwise skipping through the spatial medium of the book.13 Each chapter is a plateau that repeats and varies the themes of the other plateaus. Each chapter is different and yet connected. The premise for reading Jerusalem as a rhizomatic book is to take seriously the fact that the pages of Blake’s book were originally plates. They have now become plateaus that the reader can change just as Blake changed them in the process of production. Each of the four chapters – introduced by a full-page pictorial design – is a plateau (a multiplicity or an energy level that connects with other plateaus), just like each of the chapters in A Thousand Plateaus which are all introduced by a full-page image and a date. Some plates may even be plateaus that repeat events in the mode of difference: Albion and Luvah can die many deaths and Jerusalem can be built many times; emanations can be lost, endangered, and recovered simultaneously on different plateaus. Each plateau creates different multiple subjects. Therefore, I would claim that Jerusalem’s first two plates comprise the rhizomatic poetics of the book. An ambiguous figure (unclear identity, gender neutral) enters a door (that could be located in a city wall) pointing the reader towards the idea that this is a book about beginnings and about entering spaces. This is exactly the kind of threshold experience the reader undergoes many times. With each changed identity, each change of topic, audience, location, or voice, the reader has to re-enter the text. On the second plate, the simultaneity of the text and its spatial remoteness is stressed. This is not an imitation of the world, but rather a deterritorialization of the world by the text. The lepidopterous women form a

13

lish the Postmodernity of Blake. See Nelson Hilton, Unnam’d Forms. Blake and Textuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Subsequent studies naturally resorted to Derrida. See, for example, Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). With the pictorial turn, the illuminations were included in readings of Blake’s works. See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Recent studies presuppose the affinity between Blake and postmodern theory by no longer negating or glossing over incomprehensibilities in texts such as Jerusalem. For a more detailed discussion of the relation between Romanticism and postmodern theory, consult the introduction of this study. If there is a counter-argument against reading Jerusalem as rhizomatic book, it consists in the cyclic structure of repetitions that hints at a radicle-book rather than a rhizome-book. A radiclebook lies between the hierarchically organized root-book and the sprawling rhizome-book. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 6.

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cycle of different states and moods: crying, dying, rising, and flying they populate the title page. Spatially, their actions can be depicted simultaneously, just as the entire poem depicts these multiple states a-chronologically. The reader may not be in a real city (London or Jerusalem) as expected, but his movement through the poem is that of a nomad through the city.14 While Blake does not idealize the city, as the poems on London, child labor, and poverty in Songs of Innocence and Experience equally demonstrate, neither does he deal with urban space mimetically. The city is a semiotic space, a space of the mind, as London herself explains: My Streets are my, Ideas of Imagination. / Awake Albion, awake! and let us awake up together. / My Houses are Thoughts: my Inhabitants; Affections, / The children of my thoughts, walking within my blood-vessels, / Shut from my nervous form which sleeps upon the verge of Beulah / In dreams of darkness, while my vegetating blood in veiny pipes, / Rolls dreadful thro’ the Furnaces of Los, and the Mills of Satan.15

London, too, suffers from Albion’s dream of molar selfhood. It (or he or she) suffers as a body and as a metaphor for textual creation. Several semantic fields collide or emerge in this quotation: The city with furnaces, streets, mills, pipes is an industrial space. The body with vessels and veins evokes associations of blood that are frequently deployed in the poem. Finally, the imagination, thoughts, and Los as the poet-figure point towards the textual nature of this city space. Conflations of the three dimensions of alimitation are typical of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a poem whose space can be explained through the image of the rhizome because it consists of different plateaus and assemblages of multiple subjects. In this regard, Jerusalem is one of the most radical texts of a-limitation in the Romantic period. I will now take a step back and look at different concepts of space and boundary crossing before I return to the idea of the rhizomatic book in the discussion of Leaves of Grass. The next sections will deal with other modes of spatial a-limitation, starting with the careful exploration of smooth space in Der Taugenichts.

14

15

Davis Michael’s main contention in relation to Jerusalem is that the poem functions like a city through which we can move in a number of different ways. The different voices and multiplicities imitate the masses moving and talking in the city (104). Davis Michael draws on various spatial theories, for example using Michel de Certeau to describe the practice of walking and writing the city/poem (178). See Davis Michael, Blake and the City. This study builds on Davis Michael’s idea of combining different spatial theories with the Blakean text by re-reading it with the help of A Thousand Plateaus. Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 180.

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Changing Spaces: the Taugenichts on the threshold The Taugenichts as settler, migrant, and nomad Most of Eichendorff’s narratives and quite a few Romantic texts in general begin with a departure or some kind of travel situation. Arriving, leaving, and travelling determine the space in which the literary subjects move and exist as a frame for the reader. By the end of the text, the spatial movement has, more often than not, been reversed. In the beginning of Das Marmorbild, Florio arrives in Lucca; at the end he departs from the city. Friedrich (in Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart) is travelling on a river at the beginning and arrives at a monastery at the end. The literary subjects from other Romantic texts discussed in this study move in a similar fashion: Ishmael takes to the sea to resurface and to be rescued from the sea in the end. Where Heinrich’s journey will lead him remains uncertain, but in the beginning of the story stands his departure from his home and towards the end stands the promise that man is always headed home. Anselmus’s final destination is a matter of interpretation. He steps out of the city-gate of Dresden in the beginning, finally to arrive in Atlantis (or to drown) at the end of the narrative. In most cases, the reader can close his or her book at ease because the subjects are located in space. Where is the Taugenichts, the scallywag from Eichendorff’s novella of the same title, located?16 Sleepily, he sits on the threshold of his father’s mill. His location is the boundary zone between two spaces. On the one side stands the mill whose monotonous rattling Novalis sees in opposition to the creative music of the universe, thereby designating the mill as a space of labor and not of art and creativity.17 On the other side is the open and unknown space that is simply called “the world” in the novella. It is into this world that the Taugenichts’s father sends him, and he is met with no resistance since his 16 17

‘Taugenichts’ means scallywag or good-for-nothing in German. The main protagonist and autodiegetic narrator of the story never reveals his real name. Novalis uses the mill as a metaphor for the self-perpetuating uncreative state of imagined hatred against religion or the Bible. This shows that the mill as part of a greater industrial chain of production has a negative connotation: “Noch mehr – der Religions-Haß, dehnte sich sehr natürlich und folgerecht auf alle Gegenstände des Enthusiasmus aus, verketzerte Fantasie und Gefühl, Sittlichkeit und Kunstliebe, Zukunft und Vorzeit, setzte den Menschen in der Reihe der Naturwesen mit Noth oben an, und machte die unendliche schöpferische Musik des Weltalls zum einförmigen Klappern einer ungeheuren Mühle, die vom Strom des Zufalls getrieben und auf ihm schwimmend, eine Mühle an sich, ohne Baumeister und Müller und eigentlich ein ächtes Perpetuum mobile, eine sich selbst mahlende Mühle sey.” Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol.2. Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk., ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999) 741. Novalis’s belief in what Deleuze and Guattari call “involution” – the idea that man is not necessarily the end-point of a progressive development – can also be detected in this quotation.

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son has recently been thinking about travelling anyway.18 The mill is part of the organized world of labor, the capitalist world of the father that is predicated on the accumulation of wealth and that is hierarchically structured. It is a static place in a greater agricultural structure that does not leave any room for the Taugenichts, expelling him from its inner machinery.19 This is why the Taugenichts, one of the more prominent Romantic anti-capitalists, sits on the threshold of the mill, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, is a striated space. Striated space stands in opposition to the smooth space represented by travelling through the unbounded world, a world that is not limited by territorial borders and organized nature and labor. The following section explores the construction and deconstruction of the opposition between smooth and striated space, which is described in detail in the “Theory Plateau on Spatial A-limitation” (chapter 8).20 Because of his ambiguous position between two spaces (mill and world), the Taugenichts is an ideal figure to explain the spatial ambi-

18 19

20

See Joseph von Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, eds. Wolfgang Frühwald and Brigitte Schillbach (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007) 446. Romantic texts in general and Eichendorff in particular often express an early form of anti-capitalism by opposing technological commercial advancements. They convey their criticism most prominently by constructing a binary opposition between philistines and poets. We encounter this phenomenon not only in Eichendorff’s Taugenichts but also in other texts, for instance in Der goldne Topf, which is discussed in chapter 3 of this study. On anti-capitalism in Romanticism in general see Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (München: Beck, 1984). For a study on anti-capitalism in Der Taugenichts see Alexander von Bormann, “Philister und Taugenichts. Zur Tragweite des romantischen Antikapitalismus,” Aurora. Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft 30/31 (1970/1) 94–112. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism is closely linked to their critique of the molar subject, which psychoanalysis promotes via the propagation of the Oedipus complex. In Deleuze and Guattari’s way of thinking, the nomadic way of life in pre-signifying regimes becomes territorialized through the establishment of despotic and imperial regimes. Capitalism as the next step in this progression deterritorializes again, but is at the same time reterritorialized by the state that keeps the flows of desire in check. The Oedipal idea of the family is part of this reterritorialization because it constitutes a territory or a structure in which the subject is positioned according to the father-mother-child-scheme. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 153–300. There are striking similarities between the Romantic and postmodern critiques of capitalism. The previous chapter, for instance, analyzes the rejection of the Oedipal family in favor of multiple subjects in Ofterdingen and Jerusalem. The present chapter does not focus in detail on the economic developments in Romanticism. They are, however, part of the geopolitical and ecological changes that take place in the early nineteenth century. These changes and their literary representations are discussed against the background of the specifically spatial theory in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, namely in A Thousand Plateaus. On the models of the smooth and the striated see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 523– 51.

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guity of Romantic texts in an age of emerging technological advancement, massive territorial changes, and early ecological destruction.21 These changes are not visible upon a first reading of Der Taugenichts, but they are implicitly built into the character of the Taugenichts and become visible on his journey from Germany to Vienna to Rome and back to Vienna. At the beginning of this journey he is sitting between two spaces: the smooth space of the nomad and the striated space of the working sedentary. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the nineteenth century transformed “free action” in smooth space into “work” in striated space and thus created a “Work-model” that was part of the State apparatus.22 The link they draw between capitalism, the development of nation states, and spatial changes is not merely a Deleuzian metaphor but a historical development that includes cartography, exploration, colonization, the development of international markets, and globalization.23 In short, the nineteenth century underwent massive temporal and spatial transformations which the Taugenichts echoes. By departing from his home, the Taugenichts not only lives the ideal Romantic existence as a traveler, but he also numbers among the 82 million people who voluntarily migrated across borders (often in search of work in an increasingly capitalist and globalized market) between 1815 and 1914.24 If we assume that the story takes place roughly around the time it was written (between 1817 and 1825, first published in 1826),25 the Taugenichts belongs to the first generation of nineteenth-century migrants. He takes his only possession, a violin, leaves his parents’ house and the farmers wanting to hire him and enters the smooth space of the world as a nomad. The nomad is a terminological metaphor that Deleuze and Guattari employ to convey a bundle of related concepts. They draw on existing or historical nomadic cultures as well as on literature (for example Greek mythology and Kleist), mathematics, and physics to construct their nomad. In this section, I will look at the Taugenichts as a nomad and at the spaces he traverses as smooth and striated spaces from two perspectives: the geophilosophical framework of A Thousand Plateaus and the historical framework of economic and ecological changes in the early nineteenth century. Since the Taugenichts as a literary subject exists at the intersection of metaphoric and real existence, his analysis calls for a combination of perspectives that privileges neither 21

22 23 24 25

I use a combination of historical and even ecocritical approaches with the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. I follow Hubert Zapf’s argument that late Postmodernism shows traces of a turn towards ecological thinking. See Hubert Zapf, “Kulturökologie und Literatur. Ein transdisziplinäres Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft,” Kulturökologie und Literatur. Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Hubert Zapf (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008) 25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 540. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München:. Beck, 2009). Ibid., 235–50. See the commentary on Der Taugenichts in Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 789.

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side.26 This means that the Taugenichts as (Deleuzian) nomad cannot be entirely understood as one of the historical migrants. Deleuze and Guattari explain the difference between the nomad and the migrant as follows: The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less distinct for that….27

Both migrant and nomad move through space, but one is guided by points and destinations (attributes of striated space) and the other by the path itself (the path, the line, the trajectory are all elements of smooth space). To the nomad any point is only a relay that leads to the next point: “The life of the nomad is the intermezzo”.28 He occupies smooth space; in contrast to the migrant, who is leaving hostile territory, the nomad clings to his smooth space. The nomad is the deterritorialized subject par excellence because there is no prospect of reterritorialization as there is for the migrant or the sedentary subject.29 The first scene of departure shows that the Taugenichts, situated on a threshold, has the potential to be a sedentary subject (remaining in the mill), a migrant (looking for work in the world), or a nomad (travelling at different speeds through smooth space). Two contrasting spaces (mill and world) constitute two different modes of existence (sedentary or migrant/nomadic) and two different kinds of spaces (striated and smooth). This opposition is extended in the following lines of the text: mill/house/village versus world/road/fields. Yet, the world is not entirely smooth. A first indication of this is given by the father, the master of striated space, who perceives the world as striated as well. He summons his son: “Der Frühling ist vor der Türe, geh auch einmal hinaus in die Welt und erwirb dir selber dein Brot”.30 (Spring is approaching; go out into the world and earn your own bread.) While the world is determined by work in the case of the father, it principally means travelling for the Taugenichts. He leaves behind his old friends, who are engaged in the literal striation of space, namely in plowing,31 and steps out into the open fields to walk down the road without a plan or a destination in mind. 26

27 28 29 30

31

Most critics read Taugenichts as a metaphorical or allegorical novella and not as a document of economic and ecological change in the nineteenth century. Most prominently Oskar Seidlin, “Eichendorffs symbolische Landschaft,” Eichendorff Heute. Stimmen der Forschung mit einer Bibliographie, ed. Paul Stöcklein, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966) 218–241. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 419. Ibid., 419. Ibid., 421. Joseph von Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts in Joseph von Eichendorff,. Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, eds. Wolfgang Frühwald and Brigitte Schillbach (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007) 446. The communal plowing of the village peasants is, at the time of the Taugenichts, also in the process of a different kind of striation. Enclosures and rising agricultural prices lead to their replacement

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The Taugenichts between smooth and striated space As I will show, this open, smooth space of the Taugenichts’s world is already striated. First, however, the Taugenichts seems to move through smooth space. He leaves the territorium of the house behind on a trajectory that deterritorializes the house by changing its connotation from a place of work to a place of the violin. By strolling (schlendern) without intention or destination, the Taugenichts adopts the speed privileged by the Romantics that smooths space.32 Space as a dynamic concept is also determined by the subjects that occupy it, move in it, and construct it through social practices. Consequently, striated space can become smooth. Smooth and striated spaces are not binary oppositions but interdependent modes of spatial existence (they correspond to the molar and the molecular). They change into each other and mutually create each other. The sea, for example, is “a smooth space par excellence”,33 and yet it is striated through navigational systems and longitudes and latitudes: “It is as if the sea were not only the archetype of all smooth spaces but the first to undergo a gradual striation gridding it in one place, then another, on this side and that.”34 Yet, it can become smooth again because “there exist two nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the smooth, and one of which reimports smooth space on the basis of the striated”.35 The city is a force of striation which can reimport the sea as smooth space. The contrast facilitates not only the dynamics of smooth and striated space and thus disassembles their heuristic opposition, but also affects the subject in space: “it is possible to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth even in the cities, to be an urban nomad”.36 This also means that travelling and movement are not necessary to create smooth space. Voyages can be smooth or striated: “Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at that. It is not a question of returning to preastronomical navigation, nor to the ancient nomads. The confrontation between the smooth and the striated, the passages, alternations and superpositions, are under way today, running in the most varied directions.”37 Smooth voyaging can happen through changes of speed or orientation. This means that it must be ascertained whether the Taugenichts is voyaging smoothly and is thus becoming, or whether he belongs to

32 33 34 35 36 37

with capitalist farming methods. See Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders. Europe, 1800–1914, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 15f. The Taugenichts stresses that he ignores the offers to be hired by the other farmers. He defies his status as landless laborer and becomes a migrant (or even a nomad) instead. See for example Carsten Lange, Architekturen der Psyche. Raumdarstellung in der Literatur der Romantik (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007) 157. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 529. Ibid., 529. Ibid., 530. The same dialectics exist for the other Deleuzian concepts: de- and reterritorialization are also closely intertwined and beget each other. The smooth is part of deterritorialization. Ibid., 532. Ibid., 532.

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striated space. At the beginning of his voyage, the Taugenichts walks through striated fields, which are parceled and limited, and creates his own smooth space by appropriating the road for his slow wanderings and his music (he immediately starts playing his violin). After his encounter with two beautiful ladies, the Taugenichts’s voyage gains speed as he jumps on their coach to Vienna. Suddenly, his voyage has a destination, one which he quickly invents to hide his nomadic nature. Vienna as a striated city becomes a point on his journey. The question is if it is just an intermezzo or a relay. During his journey towards Vienna, the Taugenichts remains on the threshold between smooth and striated space: he thinks about his home ready to jump off the ladder where he temporarily resides. His liminal journey is remarkable in two ways. Firstly, the coach is travelling at an impossible speed. Secondly, the spatio-temporal descriptions are incoherent.38 The Taugenichts recounts how he jumps on the wagon: “der Kutscher knallte und wir flogen über die glänzende Straße fort, daß mir der Wind am Hute pfiff. Hinter mir gingen nun Dorf, Gärten und Kirchtürme unter, vor mir neue Dörfer, Schlösser und Berge auf; unter mir Saaten, Büsche und Wiesen bunt vorüberfliegend, über mir unzählige Lerchen in der klaren blauen Luft”.39 (the driver cracked his whip and we flew along the glittering road so fast that the wind whistled around my hat. Behind me villages, gardens, and church towers disappeared and before me appeared new villages, castles, and mountains; below me fields, bushes, and meadows flew by, and above me countless larks in the blue air) Grammatically, this description imitates the high speed of the journey. Despite the segmentation of space into up, down, in front, and behind, the impression is one of confusion and simultaneity. The coach’s unnatural velocity seems to withdraw it from ordered space. The Taugenichts experiences the same kind of acceleration during a later journey on a stagecoach: “Rechts und links flogen Dörfer, Städte und Weingärten vorbei, daß es einem vor den Augen flimmerte”40 (on the right and on the left villages, towns, and vineyards flew past so that everything seemed to flicker before my eyes), and once more at the end of the text: “und so flogen wir nun im schönsten Morgenglanze zwischen den Bergen und Wiesen hinunter”41 (and so on this beautiful morning we flew past mountains and meadows). In fact, the experienced acceleration is so high that the seasons are cut short. The Taugenichts leaves his village in the spring, 38

39 40 41

The ungeographical spaces in Eichendorff’s texts are interpreted in many ways. Oskar Seidlin’s theological reading, which understands space as the symbol for a more complex religious meaning, is widely accepted and serves as a basis for more recent criticism. See Seidlin, “Eichendorffs symbolische Landschaft,” 221. Reading Eichendorff with Deleuze is a similar method because it also employs (philosophical) concepts to help understand the spaces in Eichendorff. I would, however, like to stress that in this study a symbolic reading is combined with the examination of historical spatial changes. Eichendorff, 450. Ibid., 501. Ibid., 547.

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but during his journey on the coach the weather is humid and the cornfields are heaving in the breeze.42 Albrecht Koschorke reads the acceleration of time via incoherent spatial images as a synthetic creation of an experience that is soon to follow with technological advancements such as the steam engine on trains and boats.43 This reading entails the twofold striation of the Taugenichts’s space: he is headed towards a definite point (Vienna) and is anticipating the striation of space through railroad tracks and the economic utilization of rivers. The historical striation of space starts around the time Taugenichts is written. The historian David Blackbourn describes in great detail how Frederick the Great initiates an extensive scheme for land reclamation in Prussia (along the Oder), thus definitively changing the smooth space of the eighteenth century.44 Only the Seven Years War temporarily interrupts the drainage of the marshes, building of dikes, and modification of river courses. Masses of people are mobilized to settle in the newly won territories, and the state sends soldiers to accelerate the process. Around the time Taugenichts is written, something similar happens on the shores of the Rhine – a river that is celebrated passionately by the Romantics. While Napoleon is straightening out (or striating) Germany’s political landscape by centralizing the small territories into the Rheinbund, the course of the river is also rectified.45 Thus, the rectification of the Rhine reflects a “larger pattern of state building”, and it contributes to the process by shifting and creating borders.46 Until the nineteenth century, the Rhine resembles a rhizome with many channels, banks, and sandbars.47 The change in the course of the river improves the riverside’s protection from flooding and means that new land for cultivation is won. New trade-routes and better borders are created. Most importantly, travelling by boat becomes faster and makes shipping more profitable. This is a global phenomenon. Waterways in Britain are similarly changed (deepened) to extend commerce into the countryside.48 On the riverside of the Rhine, small-scale fishermen and gold diggers lose their smooth space to economic striation. The Rhine-Gold disappears into the realm of

42

43 44

45 46 47 48

Richard Alewyn describes the relation between time and movement in space as the “Komposition von ungreifbaren Elementen”. Richard Alewyn, “Eine Landschaft Eichendorffs,” Probleme und Gestalten (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983) 211. See Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts. Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990) 205ff. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature. Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Pimlico, 2007) 31. The information on Frederick the Great’s Oderbruch project is taken from the pages 21–37. In the following paragraph I combine Blackbourn’s historical analysis with the Deleuzian concept of the smooth and the striated. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 71–111. Gildea, Barricades and Borders. Europe, 1800–1914, 13.

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mythology.49 Shortly after the publication of Taugenichts, planning for the straightening and deepening of the Danube starts. When the Taugenichts travels along the Danube, it is a slow, shallow river shored by primeval forest.50 In 1824, the first steamboats travel on the Rhine, in 1831 they travel along the Danube.51 Only a few years later, not only travelling by water but also by land will have changed: trains replace the slow coaches. This means that the space the Taugenichts perceives as smooth is already threatened by striation, or is even already striated. He hikes through villages and fields because the primeval forest and the marshes have retreated in the face of striation by the state. Striation is intensified by the rectangular arrangement of fields and their separation from the surrounding forest.52 The Taugenichts’s world experiences the first traces of an advancing territorialization that cannot be reversed. Protests against concomitant ecological problems are uttered relatively early despite the inevitability of progress.53 The Taugenichts is not an active protester, but an embodiment of early attempts to cope with the spatial changes.54 Not only natural space, but also political space is changing. Territories evolve from the colorful patchwork that defines the political landscape prior to the Napoleonic Wars. The regulation of rivers becomes a means of annexing territories.55 Osterhammel describes how economic boundaries are also affected: currencies, standards of measurement, and tariffs are standardized not only in Germany but around the world. The border that is protected by policemen, soldiers, and customs officers is a product of and an indexical sign for “eines Prozesses der Territorialisierung von Macht” (a process of the territorialization of power).56 The political patchwork quilt has become an anachronism.57

49 50

51 52

53 54

55 56 57

See Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 98ff. As a result of massive flooding in the mid-eighteenth century, endeavors to dike the Danube in order to modify the river to meet the agricultural needs of the region commenced. From 1780 levies were built, and from 1840 first ideas on the regulation of the Danube (1870–75) were discussed. See Robert Schediwy, Städtebilder. Reflexionen zum Wandel in Architektur und Urbanistik (Wien: LIT, 2005) 321. See Gildea, Barricades and Borders. Europe, 1800–1914, 14. See Johannes Kersten, Eichendorff und Stifter. Vom offenen zum geschlossenen Raum (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996) 73–91. Kersten also mentions Eichendorff’s averseness to the railroad and to industrialization. See Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde, 57–64. Similar spatial changes took place in England following the Enclosure Acts of 1701, 1761, and 1844. See Peter Coates, Nature. Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998) 113. See Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 86–95. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 180. See ibid., 180. Osterhammel uses the same metaphors for the description of political, economic, and ecologic changes that Deleuze and Guattari use for smooth and striated space. This shows that the idea of contrasting territories with nomads, patchwork, and pre-industrialized societies is not just an intellectual pastime.

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The Taugenichts’s strategies of reimparting smooth space Instead of travelling through the world as smooth space, the Taugenichts enters territories and the striated space of regulations and borders. Having arrived at the duchess’s castle, he is not in a pure striated space (the city of Vienna), but he becomes an instrument of striation first by working first as a gardener and then as a customs officer – a protector of borders. The wide world becomes small and limited, but the Taugenichts does not submit to a striated, molar existence. He learns ways of countering striation and deterritorializing space, or reimparting smooth space. The castle belongs to the space of the state and is striated by hierarchies that the Taugenichts initially accepts. In the beginning of his stay he says: “So war ich denn, Gott sei Dank, im Brote”.58 (Thank God, I was a breadwinner now) He imagines himself walking in the garden (using it as a structured space with a particular purpose) as the lord of the castle.59 Soon, however, his desire for smooth space counteracts the striated. He changes his speed again, slows down, and spends his time resting and day-dreaming in the garden where he should be working. These strategies of smoothing or deterritorializing space could also be read as changes of movement (which he also employs in the beginning when he strolls out of his village) and changes of purpose and perception. In his little custom-house, the Taugenichts engages in a third strategy: boundary crossing. As a place of border control, the custom-house itself is delimited by boundaries: Dicht am herrschaftlichen Garten ging die Landstraße vorüber, nur durch eine hohe Mauer von derselben geschieden. Ein gar sauberes Zollhäuschen mit rotem Ziegeldache war da erbaut, und hinter demselben ein kleines buntumzäuntes Blumengärtchen, das durch eine Lücke in der Mauer des Schloßgartens hindurch an den schattigsten und verborgensten Teil des letzteren stieß.60 (The country road passed the stately garden, separated from it only by a high wall. A nice and clean little custom-house with a red tiled roof was built there, and behind it a little enclosed flower garden that was attached to the darkest and most secret part of the castle’s garden through a hole in the wall.)

While the boundary between the castle and the road is clearly defined by a high wall, the custom-house sits on this boundary and becomes the connection between the road and the garden. The Taugenichts, however, who, being a customs officer, should be an instrument of striation, refuses to become part of the boundary by not acknowledging it. Although he quits his nomadic existence, he does not become a typical sedentary subject. By using the garden in opposition to its original purpose (agriculture) and planting flowers, which he lays out in the garden for his secret beloved, the Taugenichts disre58 59 60

Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, 454. Peter Coates points out: “Landscapes of leisure were no more innocent and no less enclosed than landscapes of agricultural progress”. Coates, Nature, 115. The garden, therefore, is a striated space. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, 464–66.

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gards sedentary life. In order to deliver the flowers, he jumps over the wall. This explicit crossing of spatial boundaries is repeated several times in the novel: he surmounts not only several walls, but also fences; he jumps out of windows, flees through locked gates, and climbs iron gates. On several occasions he perches on walls and thresholds. Geographical borders pose no greater challenge to the transgressor: with unnatural speed the Taugenichts travels from Italy to the Danube.61 These strategies (change of movement, change of purpose and perception, the crossing of boundaries) are necessary because the Taugenichts’s endeavors to travel smoothly are constantly interrupted by territorialities. What happens to the Taugenichts when he encounters territories? Does he use them as relays enabling him to smooth the striated and remain in a mode of becoming? Or is he affected by the striation surrounding him to the point of eventually becoming a sedentary subject in striated space? In short, how are space and the subject connected?62 The sedentary existence of a customs officer is not a permanent solution for the Taugenichts. Crying out: “Unser Reich ist nicht von dieser Welt”63 (Our kingdom is not of this world), he grabs his violin and moves on. Romantics used the quotation from John 18:36 to defend the right of poetry against the prosaic world.64 Hence, the Taugenichts distances himself from the world of the father/state/striated and instead turns towards the poetic/transcendent/smooth.65 The Taugenichts has the world at his feet. The road splits into several roads forming a web, or perhaps even a rhizome, that allows the Taugenichts to go down several paths. The Taugenichts does not choose the road most or least taken – he does not choose at all: he starts running “ohne an die verschiedenen Wege zu denken, auf der Straße fort, die mir eben vor die Füße kam”66 (without thinking about the different paths, on the road I happened to be on). He is guided by the 61 62

63 64 65

66

On the improbability of the Taugenichts’s journey see in greater detail Seidlin, “Eichendorffs symbolische Landschaft,” 224. Thus, relation is a debated concept in Eichendorff scholarship. Since Alewyn’s argument against a subjective landscape as pathetic fallacy that reflects the mood of the subject, Romantic landscape in Eichendorff is viewed differently. Alewyn, “Eine Landschaft Eichendorffs,” 206. A recent attempt to combine a spatially oriented approach with psychological externalizations can be found in Lange, Architekturen der Psyche. I do not argue that space is an expression of feelings, but understand space as a discrete concept that is nevertheless interacting with the subject and thus interdependent. Movements of the subject through space allow for conclusions about its dynamics. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, 488. See Frühwald’s commentary on Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart. Sämtliche Erzählungen I, 812. Deleuze and Guattari would argue that transcendence has nothing to do with the smooth. The Romantic combination of smooth and divine, however, differs slightly from their terminological construct. On the relation between Deleuze and Romanticism in general see the introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 2. In relation to the previous chapters and the idea of becoming-woman one could also argue that his departure from the world of his father equates with the Taugenichts’s becoming-woman. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, 489.

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path and not by the destination and thus seems to become nomadic again. Indeed, space becomes smoother around him: the road turns into a trail and then into a steep track. Finally, the Taugenichts has arrived in the pre-urban forest of the mountains. Playing the violin, which he uses several times to escape striated life, he travels through landscapes that seem untouched by agricultural and industrial developments.67 Deleuze and Guattari explain that smooth and striated spaces constantly change, mingle, and reimpart each other. This is exactly what happens to the Taugenichts in the forest. He begins to stumble over roots, quits his music, becomes hungry, and suddenly feels lost in the seemingly infinite and unlimited forest: “Hier war es so einsam, als läge die Welt wohl hundert Meilen weit weg”68 (In this loneliness it feels as if the world was a hundred miles away), he complains. He no longer desires the infinite world, but longs for the civilized world, the next village, the striated world of the father. There is a tendency to striate space if it becomes uncomfortably smooth. Alewyn explains that Eichendorff rarely mentions unlimited and empty spaces such as the plain or the sea and, if he does, it is with discomfort.69 These prototypical smooth spaces seem to go too far for Eichendorff. The ambiguity of the meaning of ‘the world’ (striated space of the migrant looking for work or that of the working sedentary versus the smooth space of the poetic nomad in untouched nature) also applies to the Taugenichts himself. The forest scene shows that open space (associated with freedom and poetry) is also an uncanny and a threatening space.70 In this forest the Taugenichts encounters a shepherd who is playing his shalm and does not pay much attention to the nervous traveler asking for the way to the next village. This shepherd is the only real nomad in the text. He does not need to travel fast, but he clings to the smooth space of the forest. In comparison, the Taugenichts is not a nomad, but he is not a sedentary subject either. Moving from place to place without a destination in mind, he assumes nomadic characteristics. Yet, he lingers in territories and sometimes even attempts to have a synoptic view of the situation by climbing on trees.71 And then again, he seldom knows where he is going or why and always arrives only to depart soon thereafter. By remembering the old mill as his original territory, he carries the potential for striation with him, just as he carries the violin as the instrument of smooth space. 67 68 69 70 71

The term ‘landscape’ already implies a striation. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, 492. See Alewyn, “Eine Landschaft Eichendorffs,” 224. See Kersten, Eichendorff und Stifter, 20–26. Looking down on the world from a higher point is a typical perspective in Eichendorff’s texts as many critics have argued. See ibid., 27ff. for an overview. While this perspective of open space is true, it is not one of smooth space. The bird’s-eye view structures and striates space. The eye that segments space and focuses on the horizon is a sense that belongs to striated space. At no point does the Taugenichts really gain a summary view. More often than not he has lost his way and arrives at another point by chance and not because of any planning or knowledge on his part. Again, the Taugenichts is oscillating between striated and smooth.

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The Taugenichts not only creates smooth (or striated) spaces by changing his speed or by crossing (or accepting) boundaries, he also constructs space through his own perception. Since the novel’s narrator is the autodiegetic Taugenichts, its entire space is constructed by him. This is, however, not always as apparent to the reader as in the following examples of his stop-overs at the Italian castle and in Rome. After living very comfortably in the castle, the Taugenichts receives a love letter that prompts him to depart. This is when he discovers that he is (or seems to be) a prisoner. Following this realization, the space of the castle immediately changes into that of a prison and the housekeeper changes into an evil witch. In several instances, people or spaces change from being light and friendly into being uncanny and dangerous. The many transformations and confusions revolving around the Taugenichts’s beautiful lady are part of these perceptual changes. The Taugenichts escapes the uncanny castle and arrives in Rome. Yet the city of Rome is transformed by his idiosyncratic perception into something that hardly resembles striated city space.72 Before entering Rome, the Taugenichts walks through the smooth and mythical space of the lonely heath. The city also seems empty. While Blake engages the multitudes in Jerusalem and Poe warns of their danger, Eichendorff decides to smooth city space in a different manner. Only shabby people, the city nomads, are visible. The Taugenichts slows down, even seems to sleep-walk through the deserted streets. He apparently finds his beautiful lady and then loses her again. His night-time stroll through the city transforms the organized space of fast life into something smooth and slow. The Taugenichts perceives spaces and subjects in a disorganized manner. To him, they are in a process of becoming-being.73 What could be read as a comedy of confused identity can also be seen as the negation of the molar and sedentary subject in favor of the molecular subject that is becomingother. The Taugenichts perceives subjects as if they were becoming-beings rather than individuals. The pretty duchess first transforms into a chubby lady and then into a grim one. In the end, she is no duchess at all. Young men turn out to be girls. Robbers ini72

73

This study interprets the perception of Rome as nomadic or smooth. There are other possibilities, such as the allegorical reading of Rome as a religious vision suggested by Seidlin. See Seidlin, “Eichendorffs symbolische Landschaft,” 221. The broad conclusion that this description is not realistic, i.e. that it is romanticized, should be accompanied by the acknowledgment that this particular description is the result of the historical striation of cities to describe them unrealistically. Kersten points out that Eichendorff usually uses negative attributes to describe cities. See Kersten, Eichendorff und Stifter, 54–61. This supports the assumption that the description of Rome is a strategy to reimpart smooth space into the striated city. Alewyn analyzes the Eichendorff-landscape as a combination of movement that departs from the notion of bodily existence and structure and finite landscape. See Alewyn, “Eine Landschaft Eichendorffs,” 217, 19, 28. Following Deleuze and Guattari it could be argued that through his movement through unorganized space the Taugenichts is shedding his organized body and thus becomes a body without organs. And yet, he also interrupts his movement by encountering boundaries and by settling down.

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tially turn out to be artists and ultimately the true nobles in the novella. None of these subjects are persons or individuals. They are fluid types ready to change into another variation and to connect differently to the Taugenichts. The deterritorialized, de-subjectified, or molecular constitution of subjects perceived by the Taugenichts may be a result of the spatial dissymmetry of the Taugenichts himself who oscillates between smooth and striated space, between nomad, migrant, and sedentary subjectivity. Since the Taugenichts is an autodiegetic narrator, he creates a smooth textual space for his reader where reading is slowed down and the senses are confused. How can the reader identify stable subjects if her perception is mediated through the undecided Taugenichts who resists striation by creating a world of deterritorialized subjects around him? The effect on the reader is a tendency to read space and subjects as allegorical constructions instead of as descriptions of real experiences. Yet, the Taugenichts embodies the difficulties subjects experience in a time of intensified territorialization and the concomitant resistance against this striation of natural space. He personifies the spatial dynamics that Deleuze and Guattari describe as follows: “we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space”.74 The Taugenichts is both: an agent of striation (gardener, customs officer) and a translator into smooth space (musician, boundary crosser, nomad). He is a conceptual figure but he conceptualizes a historical tension emerging with the reconfiguration of space. At the end of the novella stands the notorious sentence: Sie lächelte still und sah mich recht vergnügt und freundlich an, und von fern schallte immerfort die Musik herüber, und Leuchtkugeln flogen vom Schloß durch die stille Nacht über die Gärten, und die Donau rauschte dazwischen herauf – und es war alles, alles gut!75 (She smiled quietly and looked at me, pleased and benignly, and in the distance the music played and the fireworks flew over the castle through the quiet night above the gardens, and the Danube was roaring below us – and everything, everything was alright!)

After all the confusion, the resistance against the striated, the de-subjectification of all characters, this ending is somehow disappointing. It seems to be an unfitting fairytale ending that contributes to Eichendorff’s reputation as a rather one-sided and simpleminded writer amongst the great philosopher-poets of German Romanticism. Nevertheless, the ending is consistent with the Taugenichts as a conceptual figure. On his way back to the castle and his lover, the Taugenichts encounters travelling students with an outdated map that is still showing the emperor. This old map should have been replaced by a new one more accurately depicting the political and geographical changes, but it still helps them find Vienna. While the State apparatus has inscribed its striating power on the map, it is not a representation of the world. Like the Taugenichts himself, the 74 75

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 524. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, 561.

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map is on the threshold between the old empire and a new territory. It serves the Taugenichts to find his own territory: his home and his girl. He is happy about the house that his new uncle gives to him and his bride, but at the same time he is thinking about leaving. The Taugenichts remains on the threshold between sedentary and nomadic subjectivity and between smooth and striated space.76 Everything is alright because he is allowed to linger on this threshold watching the river flow – the Danube has not been rectified yet.

Approaching limits: Charlotte Smith’s visions of the sea Land and sea as ambiguous spaces Profound spatial changes and the acceleration of travel coincide with a slower, deliberate movement through space in the Romantic period. The Taugenichts uses the faster and modern means of transportation to travel at an uncanny speed, but he is also a stroller or a pedestrian. He is a literary contemporary of the Romantic pedestrian. In Germany, England, and North America, Romantics set out to travel by foot and write texts about their pedestrian excursions. Wordsworth contributed to the Lake District’s ongoing popularity as a recreational area for hiking and walking and also embarked on his grand tour on foot.77 John Clare was concerned with environmental changes such as enclosures and the drying up of ponds.78 Henry David Thoreau’s excursions around Walden Pond inspired ecological movements of the twentieth century.79 His essay “Walking” celebrates the Romantic pedestrian and the smooth space of the swamp.80 76

77

78

79

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The ambiguity of the Taugenichts, which Kersten understands as one between open and closed space, is also constitutive of other characters in Eichendorff’s works. Kersten, Eichendorff und Stifter, 65. Wordsworth inspired ecocritical and ecopoetic readings. Killingsworth, for example, reads “The World Is Too Much with Us” as a poem about “human loss and alienation from nature [that] resonates with modern environmental thinking.” Myrth Jimmie Killingsworth, Walt Whitman and the Earth. A Study in Ecopoetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,2004) 57f. Jonathan Bate also discusses various texts by Wordsworth. See Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000). Peter Coates, for example, discusses John Clare as “a forefather of today’s radical environmentalism”, naming his poems “The Village Minstrel” and “The Lamentations of Round Oak Waters” as examples. Coates, Nature, 113f. On Thoreau and environmentalism see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination. Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). Thoreau claims that a “town is saved […] by the woods and swamps that surround it”. Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 242. This quote calls for a Deleuzian reading and a comparison with reterritorialized landscape in other texts such as the Taugenichts. Since this study can only discuss

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Recent approaches to the relation between nature and literature such as ecocriticism and ecopoetics locate the roots of environmental concerns in Romanticism.81 Not only prototypical Romantics walk through the increasingly striated landscape, walking becomes “gradually assimilated into mainstream culture in the last quarter of the eighteenth century”.82 The fictional students the Taugenichts encounters on his journey back to Vienna have countless historical counterparts. In England, too, walking tours are part of undergraduate subculture.83 The educated classes are on foot for other reasons than the migrants who are looking for work or who are fleeing from war. The Taugenichts is neither a student (in fact, he feels slightly uncomfortable among his temporary travel companions) nor a migrant nor does he belong to the newly emerging group of middle-class tourists, but his way of smoothing space is a Romantic practice. Robin Jarvis shows how complex the reasons for and practices of walking are from the 1780s to late Romanticism (ranging from safety to adventure).84 Although the Romantics did not invent pedestrian travel, they contributed significantly to a particular way of walking. The main reason for Romantic pedestrian travel is, according to Jarvis, the idea of freedom. By travelling on foot, Romantics liberated themselves from a “hierarchical and segregated society”,85 in which a man on foot could not find a place to spend the night because he was considered to be unrespectable. In a way, walking is thus the best way of smoothing space and of questioning social and spatial limits. A closer examination of Romantic texts about walking, travelling, and movement in space (for instance Taugenichts) shows that limits are not irrelevant and that the Romantic notion of space is not one of breaking all limits, just as the Romantic subject is not omnipotent, and the Romantic sign is not an early version of Derrida’s differance.

81 82 83 84

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some examples and must exclude others, Thoreau can only be acknowledged in this chapter. Furthermore, Thoreau has often been discussed in connection with spatial changes and environmentalism. See, for example, Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 116f., and most prominently Buell’s study that treats Thoreau extensively. See Buell, The Environmental Imagination. This chapter therefore focuses on Charlotte Smith, a poet who has not yet been discovered in this context. See, for example, Coates, Nature, 125–39, and Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, Repr. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008) 38–49. Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (London: Macmillan 1997) 9. See ibid., 10. See ibid. Jarvis argues that pedestrian travel is not a direct result of the transport revolution. While Anne Wallace states that voluntary travel by foot only becomes possible through an economic development that makes pedestrianism a recreational activity, Jarvis contends that walking signifies freedom at a time when pedestrian travel was still confronted with prejudices in England. See ibid., 1–28, and Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture. The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). To the Taugenichts walking (and travelling in general) certainly means freedom, but in my discussion of Charlotte Smith in this chapter I will explore the ambivalent attitude towards walking in early Romanticism that also emphasizes its negative connotation of poverty. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, 28.

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Taugenichts was written at a time when spatial striation and tremendous changes in movement could be anticipated. Its author witnessed the beginning of the age of the steam engine. Eichendorff’s mountains, forests, and sea were created at the peak of German Romanticism, and like their predecessors (for example Tieck’s uncanny caves and lonely forest mansions) they are not completely innocent. The Taugenichts almost gets lost crossing the Alps and Florio from Das Marmorbild is only one of many young men endangered by the Venus mountain; the forest and its Waldeinsamkeit (loneliness of the woods – a term that Tieck made famous) belongs to the hunters and witches and exerts a strange power on travelling people (see for example the poems “Waldesgespräch” and “Zwielicht”86) and the sea is often a place of storms, an image of nature’s upheaval and of death: “Wo schwindelnd beginnt die Ewigkeit, / Wie ein Meer, so schrecklich still und weit, / Da sinken all’ Ström’ und Segel hinein, / Da wird es wohl endlich auch ruhig sein.”87 (At the place of eternity’s giddy beginning, / like the sea, so terribly silent and vast, / where all streams and sails sink, / there it will be silent at last.) Smooth space is an ambiguous concept in Romantic texts. There seems to be a desire for smooth space to function as a medium that enables the loss of the self, that allows the subject to remain on the mountain forever, to disappear into the dark forest, or to sink into the stormy sea. But this desire also invokes an anxiety that calls for boundaries and the striated space of civilization and expresses itself through the search for the next village, the abandonment of the forest, and the avoidance of the perils of the sea. The ambivalence towards smooth space explored in the previous section can also be detected on the coast of Britain. While the Taugenichts travels through an increasingly striated space (agricultural, economic, and technological advancements), the sea also undergoes processes of striation. According to Deleuze and Guattari, these processes are a result of new navigational systems and commercial cities.88 In the nineteenth century, the oceans become important spaces of global trade, migration, colonization, and the definition of frontiers, but they are also the realm of pirates and wars.89 In the framework of geophilosophy, piracy and war deterritorialize the striated sea-space by reintroducing chaos into the organized world of the state. In early Romantic poetry, however, these forces of deterritorialization pose a threat to the subject that is not easily defined. How is the sea perceived in Romantic texts: as a sublime or picturesque space, as a political space, or as an economic space? Other factors also contribute to the com86 87 88 89

Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006) 86, 146. From the poem “Der irre Spielmann” ibid., 233. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 529. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 157–63. Moby-Dick certainly portrays the striation of the sea as economic space (hunting the whale for his resources). Ahab’s hunt, though, serves a different purpose and defies the usual business routes therefore also deterritorializing space. On this also see Hugh T. Crawford, “Captain Deleuze and the White Whale,” Social Semiotics 7.2 (1997): 219–32.

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plicated vision of the sea: from 1750 to 1840 the sea undergoes what could be called a cultural striation. It is discovered as a tourist attraction.90 Charlotte Smith portrays the sea as a multifaceted cultural imaginary constructed by ambivalent attitudes and influenced by the various factors named above. Between 1784 and 1806, she published several volumes of poems and novels. Some of her poems were also published posthumously in 1807. The mixture of genres in itself hints at a semiotically transgressive potential that is realized in the invention of a new hybrid genre (elegiac sonnets) as well as in her experiments with different sonnet models and metrics.91 Smith is not only an early Romantic poet who reintroduced the sonnet and wrote long contemplative poems in blank verse (for which Wordsworth and Coleridge would become famous).92 She is also a poet of the sea. A large proportion of Smith criticism focuses on her biography or her position in the intellectual field as a female poet. Unquestionably, this perspective is important as it reshaped the Romantic canon in the 1990s. In this section I would like to pay tribute to the gendered analysis of Smith’s poems with a short excursion into her role as a forerunner or inventor of the English variant of subject a-limitation. In this excursion, the historical person Charlotte Turner Smith shall surface. The larger part of the section, however, deals with Smith’s poetry as an advocate of smooth space. Besides the instructive children’s poems that introduce the English flora and fauna in rhyme and that are complemented by explanatory footnotes, two major themes can be identified in Smith’s poems: death and the sea. Frequently the two themes coincide. A few excerpts from Smith’s poems, mostly from her first collection Elegiac Sonnets,

90 91

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See Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea. The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750– 1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press,1994). On Smith’s role as a forerunner of Romantic experiments see Stuart Curran, “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” South Central Review 11.2 (1994): 73, and Jacqueline Labbe, “The Hybrid Poems of Smith and Wordsworth. Questions and Disputes,” European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009) 219–26. Reading the hybrid poems (elegiac sonnets and lyrical ballads) in the context of contemporary poetics (John Newbery and Hugh Blair), Labbe shows that Smith and Wordsworth were indeed pushing the boundaries of conventional genres. Writers preferred separate and recognizable genres. Therefore, Wordsworth and Smith can be considered stylistic transgressors. It could also be argued that the genre of the elegiac sonnet is an expression of the semiotic tension in Romanticism: on the one hand, a clearly structured form and on the other a transgression of form that is enforced by a transgressive content. See the introduction to her poems by Stuart Curran (xiv–xxix) in Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). In another article, Curran argues that Smith is the link between William Cowper’s neoclassical poems in blank verse, Coleridge’s Conversation Poems, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude. See Curran, “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” 73. For this reason, Smith is also situated on a formal or stylistic threshold to Romanticism.

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shall suffice to illustrate the dominance of death in her works.93 The moon prompts the lyrical I to finish sonnet number IV with the following lines: “Oh! that I soon may reach thy world serene, / Poor wearied pilgrim – in this toiling scene!”94 The pilgrim as a metaphor for a poor person travelling through life and hoping for peace in eternal rest is a recurrent figure in Smith’s poems. Sonnet number LII is devoted entirely to the pilgrim: LII The Pilgrim Faltering and sad the unhappy Pilgrim roves, Who, on the eve of bleak December’s night, Divided far from all he fondly loves, Journeys alone, along the giddy height Of these steep cliffs; and as the sun’s last ray Fades in the west, sees, from the rocky verge, Dark tempest scowling o’er the shortened day, And hears, with ear appall’d, the impetuous surge Beneath him thunder! – So, with heart oppress’d, Alone, reluctant, desolate, and slow, By Friendship’s cheering radiance now unblest, Along Life’s rudest path I seem to go; Nor see where yet the anxious heart may rest, That, trembling at the past – recoils from future woe.95

Walking is not an adventure of freedom in this particular sonnet, but rather a sad journey. This poor pilgrim is friendless and lonely and certainly belongs to the group of pedestrians unlikely to find shelter in the world. The wanderers in Smith’s poems are often sad, lonely, on the verge of succumbing to exhaustion (see for example sonnet XXXVI96). They are not cheerful good-for-nothings strolling through the countryside. Smith’s pedestrian is not yet a typical Romantic traveler. The pilgrim by the seashore is faced with frightening heights, darkness, and a deafening noise when he walks on the shore in winter. This is the predominant vision of the sea that can be found in Smith’s poems: the Gothic sea as a place for the melancholic wanderer, the lonely lover, or the pensive poet. The sea is also a space that resists striation in Smith’s poems through the negation of contemporary cultural striation. In “The Pilgrim”, the dark sublimity of the 93

94 95 96

The oppressiveness of life that results in a longing for death is one of the features Charlotte Smith is notorious for. More often than not, the topics of her poems are seen as a direct result of her troublesome life with an irresponsible husband and later as a single mother having to support several children. See, for example, Kandi Tayebi, “Charlotte Smith and the Quest for the Romantic Prophetic Voice,” Women's Writing 11.3 (2004): 421. I will analyze her poems against a broader cultural background and will not consider her personal situation or her gender as the explanation for the prevalence of the death-wish in her poems. Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 15. Ibid., 47f. Ibid., 37.

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scene poses no immediate threat to the lonely wanderer, but it does not elevate his feelings or instill the desire to transcend this life. In the closing lines, the lyrical I relates her own situation to the pilgrim’s journey by the sea – a recurring feature in Smith’s poetry. Even death is uncertain in this poem.

Excursion to the former margins of the Romantic canon: another perspective on becoming-woman This movement from observation to the speaker’s own emotional response is called the Wordsworthian pattern.97 Tayebi reads this as a blurring of subject (observation in the poems) and self (Charlotte Smith). The most prominent example of this movement is probably the notorious poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, in which the speaker observes a natural phenomenon (“a host of golden daffodils”) and contemplates it afterwards. In “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, the speaker describes the interaction between nature (object) and mind (subject) as follows: “Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, / Which on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky”.98 Another less abstract example of this movement is “The World Is Too Much with Us”. The speaker starts as a multiplicity of ‘we’. Comparisons with nature demonstrate that the sea and the winds are in harmony but humans are not. They are “out of tune”.99 A dash in the middle of line nine of the sonnet indicates a change: “Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; / Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn”.100 When the ‘we’ turns into an ‘I’ which then utters a subjective interpretation and desire, the reader witnesses the birth of the linguistic subject in this particular poem. The ‘I’, however, does not desire becoming a strong self. Rather, it wishes to regress into a mythological world from which the subject has long emancipated itself over the course of the philosophical history of the self. Smith’s sonnet “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” is a perfect example of this pattern of a-limitation. The moon controls the tides in the first stanza of the sonnet (“Press’d by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides”).101 The next stanza moves closer to man by abandoning the abstract global perspective in favor of the concrete effect of the natural phenomenon. The sea floods a graveyard at Middleton and 97

See Tayebi, “Charlotte Smith and the Quest for the Romantic Prophetic Voice,” 424. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. Martin Sconfield (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2003) 90. 99 Ibid., 184. 100 Ibid., 184. 101 Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 42. 98

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“[d]rives the huge billows from their heaving bed; / Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead.”102 There seems to be a camera zooming in from outer space to a particular place. The next stanza dwells on this transgressive opening of the graves by describing bones on the beach. It introduces other subjects. These subjects, however, are already dead and appear only in the shape of their interchangeable remains. It is in the final couplet that the lyrical I first speaks as ‘I’ and comments on this. Linguistically, this is the moment of individuation in a chain of events (abstract forces of nature, concrete observation of nature, effects on humans). But it is also a moment of dissolution. The dead bodies have lost all their senses as they have passed into the realm of death. Looking at them, the speaker says: “While I am doom’d – by life’s long storm opprest, / To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest”.103 The ‘I’ becomes a subject because it differentiates itself from other objects (the dead on the beach) but it wishes to be like them. They are not bothered by storms anymore, perhaps because they are already part of nature, or perhaps because their souls have successfully left their bodies. In any case, the ‘I’ longs for his or her own death that would allow a reunification with nature and the cosmic forces. This death-wish, or the desire for a-limitation, is prefigured in the consonance and assonance of the first words of the poem: “Press’d by the Moon” and the last rhyme couplet “long storm opprest” and “gloomy rest”. The combination of the vowel /o/ in “Moon” and “gloomy” (and as graphemes also “long storm”) with the variations of “press” and “rest” links the mythical or cosmic beginning of the poem to the dissolution of the subject at the moment of its appearance at the end of the poem. I argue that this is the basic move of subject a-limitation in Smith’s poems: from observation to self to self-annihilation. The speaker starts by describing the tides and the sea; she approaches the boundary line between the sublime ocean and then turns to human existence. When the subject makes its linguistic appearance in the final couplet, it is only to utter its desire to die and merge with the elements. Thus, the appearance of the linguistic self coincides with the wish to die (to become sea). This pattern can be found in many of Smith’s sonnets (for example in XLI “To tranquility”, XLII, and in several of the poems discussed in this section). This seems to be a typical way of inscribing the self into the text and dissolving it at the same time. Wordsworth’s comment on Charlotte Smith’s genius pays tribute to her inspirational force: “a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered. She wrote little, and that little unambitiously, but with true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English Poets.”104 His indebtedness to her is widely accepted. Wordsworth was not only 102

Ibid., 42. Ibid., 42. 104 Wordsworth writes this as a note to his poem “Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees” acknowledging that this poem was influenced by Smith’s “St. Monica”. See William Wordsworth, 103

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formally inspired by Smith’s sonnets and conversation poems, nor did he just borrow phrases from her poems.105 Nor did he just learn the “poetics of loss and self-fashioning” from Smith.106 It was from Smith that he learned what would become constitutive of Romanticism: the a-limitation of the subject.107 In a way, Wordsworth’s imitation of the pattern introduced by Smith shows how a-limitation is always a becoming-woman. Wordsworth must write in Smith’s style in order to achieve effects of a-limitation in his own poems. The fusion of subject and object, speaker and text, is also part of the becoming-sign process that women often undergo in Romantic texts (see my analysis of Das Marmorbild, Der goldne Topf, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Jerusalem). What I diagnose for literary subjects such as Mathilde or Jerusalem is also true of the living subject, Charlotte Smith. She is the boundary line, the point of access for Wordsworth’s own becoming-being. Through her, he can become a great poet by becoming-woman. As Tayebi and Labbe point out, there are historical factors that contribute to the construction of the female self as writer. Female writers already exist at the margins of society and they need to be more modest in order to survive in a market dominated by masculine selves. One of Smith’s strategies for survival is her description of personal hardship in the prefaces to her editions of Elegiac Sonnets.108 By mixing her own fate with her poetic voice, Smith “attains this blurring of subject and self much more completely than any of the other canonical Romantic writers”.109 Charlotte Smith expresses this in a letter where she writes that she was “compelled to live only to write & write only to live”.110 While this is, of course, a result of financial necessity and the subsequent need for sublimation, it is also indicative of the fusion of subject and sign called for by early German Romantics like Novalis (Monologue). Whereas most male poets The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Vol. 4, eds. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947) 403. 105 See Tayebi, “Charlotte Smith and the Quest for the Romantic Prophetic Voice,” 424f. Tayebi refers to an older essay by Hunt, in which the author points to the similarities between Wordsworth and Smith only to suggest that Wordsworth perfected the ideas of a mediocre poet. See Bishop C. Jr. Hunt, “Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith,” Wordsworth Circle 1.3 (1970) 85–103. I agree with Tayebi that Hunt’s assessment is questionable and will argue that it is actually the other way around: Wordsworth imitates a movement that could not be depicted more perfectly than in “Written in a Churchyard”. 106 Theresa M. Kelley, “Romantic Histories. Charlotte Smith and ‘Beachy Head’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59.3 (2004): 286. 107 Tayebi does not call the Wordsworthian movement a-limitation or analyze it in depth. In this excursion I would like to continue her line of thought. 108 Tayebi, “Charlotte Smith and the Quest for the Romantic Prophetic Voice,” 426. 109 Ibid., 426. On Smith’s strategy of turning the disclosure of financial worries into money also see Jacqueline Labbe, “Selling One’s Sorrow. Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry,” Wordsworth Circle 25.2 (1994) 68–71. 110 This quotation is from Smith’s letter to Thomas Shirley (Brighton, 22 August 1789). Charlotte Smith, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) 23.

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lived in financial security (often employed in a respectable day job), writing was existential for Smith. Likewise, Smith achieves this fusion of life and letter, subject and space in her poems. This makes Smith the prototype of becoming-woman. Although I am not arguing that the poems are necessarily expressive of a specifically female subjectivity, they do depict a mode of existence and a manner of composition that could be called becomingwoman, molecular, or smooth.111 Wordsworth is not the only poet who adopts the fluid existence of Smith’s poetic personae situated on the boundary between subjectivity and the dissolution into infinite space (such as the sea). The historical relation between Smith and Wordsworth demonstrates, however, that a-limitation is also connected to becoming-woman on the level of literary production. Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” delineates the same movement by tracing the birth of the subject from myth and nature to its disintegration into space (see chapter 6). Another good example is Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. The poem comprises five stanzas (all of which are sonnets if taken by themselves). The first three stanzas evoke the powers of the wind in connection with various elements. In the third stanza, the ‘I’ makes its appearance. It is, however, a liminal existence that this subject leads. The speaker wishes to be carried away by the wind: “Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”112 The speaker not only aspires to merge with nature and its fluid and ever-changing elements. He also positions himself within a mythical framework by alluding to both Jesus and Dante.113 In the final stanza, the subject completely disintegrates in order to become poet: “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! / And by the incantation of this verse, / Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! / Be through my lips to unawakened Earth // The trumpet of a prophecy!”114 Becoming-poet entails becoming-cloud, -sea, -leaf, and finally becoming-imperceptible like the wind – the force of smooth space. First of all, however, it can mean 111

Since Stuart Curran’s article on the altered concept of subjectivity in Romanticism, scholars have been trying to define what female writing is. Curran identifies female sensibility as a significant contribution to English Romanticism. See Stuart Curran, “The I Altered,” Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988) 185–207. Labbe, for instance, focuses on the economic pressure that facilitates certain publishing strategies typical of women writers. Labbe, “Selling One’s Sorrow.” Christopher Stokes, on the other hand, argues that Smith produces lost, incomplete, and fragmented subjects. Christopher Stokes, “Lorn Subjects. Haunting, Fracture and Ascesis in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,” Women's Writing 16.1 (2009) 143–60. I agree with Stokes’s notion of the gendered disposed self, but would like to re-evaluate his concept in a positive way in order to show the invention of a Romantic self as becoming-woman. 112 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Authoritative Texts, Criticism, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002) 300. 113 Jesus’s crown of thorns and the dark wood in Dante’s Inferno are invoked. See explanatory note in ibid., 300. 114 Ibid., 300f.

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becoming-woman in order to be reborn as something other than a male dominated by order and rationality. Becoming-woman through writing enables the Romantic poets to transgress the boundary between reason and emotion, a boundary with a long history in Western thought.115

Death, sea, and woman The excursion has shown that the death-wish in Charlotte Smith’s poems is an important part of her early form of subject a-limitation. In her poems, which are “Supposed to be written by Werter” (Smith takes the ‘h’ out of Goethe’s Werther), death is the only possible solution and the only constant in life (“By the same. To Solitude”): “Ah, Nymph! that fate assist me to endure, / And bear awhile – what Death alone can cure!”116 or “Yes – CHARLOTTE o’er the mournful spot shall weep, / Where her poor WERTER – and his sorrows sleep!”117 The second sonnet allows for a witty play with the author’s name. Charlotte (printed in capitals) integrates herself into the poem through Werther’s Charlotte. The last line hints at the double meaning of the name by referring to the paratextual level of the epistolary novel: The Sorrows of Young Werther. By evoking the title, the speaker changes perspectives. While the beginning is clearly narrated by Werther (“Make there my tomb, beneath the lime-tree’s shade”118 is the opening line), the last two lines could be narrated by a different person. The “Yes” could be a reply to Werther’s monologue, in which he speculates that Charlotte will cry over his grave. Therefore, the last lines could also be (as they are often in Smith’s sonnets) a change of perspective: Werther’s Charlotte confirms Werther’s speculations, or even Charlotte Smith confirms Werther’s speculations on his Charlotte. CHARLOTTE integrates herself into the poem by crossing the boundary between text and reality that the narrator of Der goldne Topf also liked to cross by meeting with his fictional friends (see chapter 3). While Werther dies by his own hand, CHARLOTTE becomes text by her own hand. In Smith’s poems there are other ways of dying than suicide and other reasons for dying 115

Alan Richardson points out that there are several strategies for absorbing female qualities employed by male writers, for example fantasizing of the mother (15) or creating androgynous characters (19). In Richardson’s article the appropriation of the female is seen as a colonizing or cannibalizing of it. At the end of the article, however, he suggests a dialectical relationship that leads to a mutual re-evaluation of subjectivity. See Alan Richardson, “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine,” Romanticism and Feminism. In the excursion I argue that the male redefinition of subjectivity as becoming-being does not function without the attributes that Deleuze and Guattari assign to becoming-woman (the molecular, smooth, nomadic, schizophrenic, rhizomatic, etc.) and which in many respects coincide with gendered characteristics of women. 116 “XXII By the same. To solitude” in Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 27. 117 “XXIV By the same” in ibid., 29. 118 Ibid., 28.

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than unfulfilled love. Freezing to death (“LXXIV The winter night”), in order to forget (“XC To oblivion”), or because of grief (“April” and “To the winds”) are only a few options and causes. In “LIV The sleeping woodman. Written in April 1790” Smith proves that April can be a very cruel month. While the first flowers start to come out, the speaker flies from “human converse” into nature.119 She sees a sleeping woodman, who – unlike the pastoral rural workers in many of Eichendorff’s or Wordsworth’s texts – is lying down in exhaustion. Again, the speaker compares herself to the resting man: “Ah! would ‘twere mine in Spring’s green lap to find / Such transient respite from the ills I bear!”120 But forgetting about life’s toil is not enough: “Till the last sleep these weary eyes shall close, / And Death receive me to his long repose.”121 This poem on dying in the woods far from human civilization forms a complementary poem to “XLIV Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” which depicts the most frequent kind of death and the spatial mode of a-limitation discussed in this chapter. Middleton is a small village of only a few houses on the coast of Southern England.122 A speaker observes how the sea’s encroachment slowly destroys the church and flushes the corpses out of their graves onto the beach. The land is conquered by the sea (“But o’er shrinking land sublimely rides”123) and a Gothic scene of sublimity is created: bones scattered on the beach against the backdrop of the thundering ocean. The speaker envies the dead because they do not hear the “warring elements” anymore and lie in silent rest.124 The sea’s function is twofold: On the one hand, it is the smooth transgressive space that deterritorializes social institutions like the church. In this respect it is loud and dangerous. On the other hand, it instigates the desire to die, and to become one with the sea. Scattered in pieces on the beach, the dead are multiple and “[w]ith shells and sea-weed mingled”125 lose their distinctive human identity (they become plant and mineral). The tombs in this sonnet relate to “Elegy” which tells the story of a young man whose father forbids him to marry an indigent woman and sends him to sea instead where he perishes in the attempt to save another vessel.126 In this poem, the girl calls upon the ocean to destroy the father’s tomb and bring peace to the dead. In this case, the desire for death is not instigated by the bones but chiefly by the ocean. The speaker seems to hear the voice of her dead lover through the waves: “And seem to say – Ah, wretch! delay no more, / But come, unhappy mourner – meet me here.”127 She realizes 119

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 49. 121 Ibid., 49. 122 Explanatory note ibid., 42. 123 Ibid., 42. 124 Ibid., 39. 125 Ibid., 42. 126 Ibid., 80–83. 127 Ibid., 82. 120

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that it is not his voice and addresses the ocean directly: “Approach, ye horrors that delight my soul! / Despair, and Death, and Desolation, hail!”128 The ocean does her bidding and sends an avenging flood. The desire to become a scattered corpse or to call on the sea to upheave the dead is transgressive. Old connotations of the sea as God’s punishing force that flooded the fertile land in the Deluge are revived in these poems. In earlier centuries, the stories from the Bible and from Greek mythology depict the sea as a chaotic space that is inhabited by monsters and reminds man of his sins.129 “LXVI Written in a tempestuous night on the coast of Sussex”130 portrays the ocean in a similar manner: its shore is cold, stony, and rugged. The caves and hollow rocks form an irregular coastline. The prevailing colors are different shades of white reminiscent of the bones in the other Sussex sonnet. The ocean seems to be in mourning, “seeming to deplore / All that are buried in his restless waves”.131 In these examples the violent flooding of land is clearly connected with death. Other views of the dangerous sea stress its quieter horrors. In these visions the sea is a space of decay, full of debris and excreta that bring disease. The most prominent example of the continuation of this view of the sea in Romanticism is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.132 A Mariner is punished in a cruel and unusual manner for killing an albatross. The ocean becomes an unhealthy and monstrous space: “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea.”133 At the same time, the sea is also the origin of life and thus a place of worship, admiration, and transcendence.134 This view is most clearly expressed in the poem “An evening walk by the sea-side” from Conversations Introducing Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History for the Use of Children and Young Persons.135 As a didactic poem, “An evening walk” reveals nothing about the transgressive Gothic sea. Instead, the ocean’s changing appearance in the cycle of the tides (usually described as arbitrary and violent) and the seasons demonstrates, “That Power, which can put the wide waters in motion, / Then bid the vast billows repose at His word; / Fills the mind with deep reverence, while Earth, Air, and Ocean, / Alike of the universe speak him the Lord”.136 In this instance, the sublime sea leads to reverence for the divine power. “An evening walk” is certainly written with a specific reader and purpose in mind, but the notion that

128

Ibid., 83. See Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 1–18. 130 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 58. 131 Ibid., 58. 132 See Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 16. 133 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 211. 134 See Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 22–32. 135 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 196–98. 136 Ibid., 198. 129

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the sea can also have transcendent or healing effects on the subject can be detected in several of Smith’s poems. “Studies by the sea” is one of the few poems not written for children that shows the sea in a different light. The spectator can see “Beauty, and use, and harmony – / Works of the Power supreme who poured the flood / Round the green peopled earth, and call’d it good” in every wave.137 Rather than with the Flood, water is associated with the creation of the world and thus linked to God’s will. “It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free” by Wordsworth expresses the same theological conception of the sea: “The gentleness of heaven is on the sea: / Listen! the mighty Being is awake, / And doth with his eternal motion make / A sound like thunder – everlastingly.”138 In Smith’s “XXXIX To night”, the sea becomes a medium through which the subject can communicate with heaven. Though the elements are “deaf cold” and the night is “cheerless” and full of “gloom”, there is hope that the sea transports the subject’s emotions to a different space: “While to the winds and waves its sorrows given, / May reach – tho’ lost on earth – the ear of Heaven!”139 Whether the sea can actually relieve the subject of its pains is a question that remains unanswered in most of Smith’s poems. Sonnet number Xl enumerates positive qualities of the sea as smooth space: it is wide, blue, silent, tranquil, but can it “soothe me to repose?”140 In many of the poems, the sea does not give relief to the suffering subject, but it offers a space in which the wish for death and melancholy contemplation are possible. To the reader, the subject’s emotional outpours on the shore seem like a pathetic fallacy.141 It is a common feature of Romantic depictions of the sea to figure its boundaries as the boundaries of the self, and to use this space for the discovery of the self. Vastness, emptiness, and open space offer a plane for the projection of the self and the seashore can function as a metaphor for the exploration of the boundaries of the self.142 In Smith’s poems the interaction between space and the subject is not one that privileges the self over space. Nature is not instrumentalized for the transcendence of the self. In this regard Smith differs from what Anne K. Mellor calls the masculine sublime, the empowerment of the self that replaces female nature.143 137

Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 294. William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 151. 139 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 39. 140 Ibid., 39. 141 See Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 164. Just as the Romantics did not invent pedestrian travel, they did not discover the sea. In both cases, however, they stimulated, changed, and enlarged spatial practices that already existed. (See Corbin, 163 on the sea and the passages on Jarvis above). 142 Ibid., 164. 143 Cf. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 90. Smith does not easily fit into into the categories Mellor devises. She neither offers a masculine sublime of empowerment, nor does she use the sublime to create a sense of community (see chapters 5 and 6 in Mellor on these categories). Some of her poems agree with Mellor’s idea of the female beautiful 138

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Another poem, which, like “Written in a churchyard”, is set explicitly on the English coast, illustrates the relation between subject and space. A lyrical I contemplates the sea at Weymouth in winter. Familiar semantic fields are evoked: coldness, darkness, whiteness or paleness, the sound of the sea, and cheerlessness.144 Only the perspective has changed: from the beach or the cliffs to the pier. In summer a different kind of scenery presents itself to the observer. Lively summer scenes, however, are not what the speaker seeks: “but ’tis mine to seek / Rather, some unfrequented shade, remote / From sights and sounds of gaitey [.] – I mourn / All that gave me delight – Ah! never to return!”145 Nature cannot change the subject nor is it used by it, but space and subject can harmonize with each other and merge into each other. Carefully, Smith approaches this merging as a transgression close to death or madness. Only the desperate lover or the lunatic can talk to the sea and live on its “giddy brink”.146 Reason prevents the self from giving in to the smooth power of the sea that looks upon the lunatic with the same longing it feels for the scattered bones: “I see him more with envy than with fear”.147

The sea as striated space of tourism and smooth space of poetry Smith’s poems exhibit a cautious preference for the smooth rather than the striated space of the sea. Like the Taugenichts, her speakers do not surrender unconditionally to the surge of the sea, but reject its striation. Set on the Southern coast of England (Sussex), in Weymouth, Brighton, and occasionally in Bristol, sometimes even in the North (on the Hebrides), the poems cover the places affected by cultural striation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They partially reject this striation and partially engage in its mechanism. The effects of fashionable bathing resorts are questioned. Weymouth in the summer has a “peopled strand” that the speaker avoids by visiting in the winter.148 In the first half of the eighteenth century, bathing and swimming became part of the rural sports of the gentry and soon developed into features of middle-class tourism.149 The sea is supposed to relieve the elites of their pale sensibility and their neuroses. By immersing themselves in the cold water and exposing their bodies to the elements they hoped to cure anxiety. In fact, the sea “was expected to cure the evils of because she pays attention to the minute particulars of nature. Other poems present a sublime that is neither connected to male power and the fear of patriarchal tyrants (as Mellor demonstrates for Radcliffe) nor to self-empowerment. On the contrary, the sublime sea kills the male tyrant (as in “Elegy”) or prompts the desire to merge with nature, though without appropriating it. 144 “LXXI Written at Weymouth in winter” Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 61. 145 Ibid., 62. 146 “LXX On being cautioned against walking on an headland overlooking the sea, because it was frequented by a lunatic” ibid., 61. 147 Ibid., 61. 148 Ibid., 61. 149 Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 78ff.

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urban civilization”.150 This desire for the sea could originate from the need to escape the striated space of the city that negatively affects people, rendering them weak and neurotic. Approaching Modernism, the desire for smooth space as compensation for striated civilization increases: Ishmael explains at the beginning of Moby-Dick that when “my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”151 In the dialectics of smooth and striated space and of de- and reterritorialization the masses’ appreciation of the sea as smooth space striates this sea space. Smith’s poem “LXIV Written at Bristol in the summer of 1794” records these spatial practices and questions their effects: “Here from the restless bed of lingering pain / The languid sufferer seeks the tepid wave, / And feels returning health and hope again / Disperse ‘the gathering shadows of the grave!’”152 These opening lines read like a doctor’s prescription in rhyme. The invalid’s situation is described through assonances and consonances: he is restless, suffering, seeks the sea, and then feels his health returning. It seems as if the sea was a cure for both mental and physical illness. Not only good air and regular bathing contribute to the healing process, but so do aesthetics: “And here romantic rocks that boldly swell, / Fringed with green woods, or stain’d with veins of ore, / Call’d native Genius forth, whose Heav’n-taught skill / Charm’d the deep echos of the rifted shore”.153 So far, Smith is in agreement with contemporary discourses on the healing powers of English shores. The last quatrain and the couplet of the sonnet, however, problematize the effects of the health resort: “But tepid waves, wild scenes, or summer air, / Restore they palsied Fancy, woe-deprest? / Check they the torpid influence of Despair, / Or bid warm Health re-animate the breast; / Where Hope’s soft visions have no longer part, / And whose sad inmate is – a broken heart?”154 The polysyndeton is interrupted by a strong “but” that turns into a question. A second question follows, with a parallel syntactic structure giving the impression of one long question. The couplet ends with a broken heart and a broken line. The dash before “a broken heart” emphasizes the intensity of the rupture. Apparently, the prescribed bathing cure is not an option for the Romantic poet. Another indication of a counter discourse to the organized exploration and exploitation of the coast as health resort are the poems written in or set in Brighthelmstone, today’s Brighton. Brighton was one of the most popular resorts around the time these poems were written.155 The beaches were occupied with bathing machines partially 150

Ibid., 62. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, eds. Harrison Hayford, et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001) 3. 152 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 56. 153 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 56. 154 Ibid., 56. 155 On the following information on Brighton see Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 58–96. 151

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shielding the bathing women from the male gaze (more often than not assisted by spy glasses). Guests adhered to the social rules of the resort: horseback riding, walking, and bathing for physical health purposes were practiced, according to social standing, with the aid of servants. Exposed to the elements, the bathing gentry was careful to respect the privacy of their fellow guests (or at least to keep up the pretense). Dress codes and rituals distinguished the bathing cure from the simple bathing of the indigent population. Staying at a resort was also a social occasion and a means to present oneself to society and search for possible liaisons. None of these practices are mentioned in Smith’s poems about Brighton. Smith’s Brighton poems seem to avoid the striated space of the resort by turning to the boundaries of society. In one poem, for example, the funeral of a beggar is contemplated, an outsider of society,156 a nomad situated at the margin of the bathing and chatting guests. Another poem is concerned with the unfortunate life of an actor whose fate is deplorable, particularly in contrast to the quiet life of the fishermen or the peasants. Brighton is mentioned in two other poems: “The female exile. Written at Brighthelmstone in November 1792”157 and “The Emigrants”.158 Both poems deal with the same political topic (an earlier version of “The female exile” appeared in “The Emigrants”). None of the typical Brighton bathing scenes are mentioned. There are no picturesque views of the pretty sea and mountain scenery. Instead, the reader is once more presented with the sea in winter (cold, dark, heavy). Sublime nature hits the exposed individual with all its force. The female exultant has “found on damp sea-weed a cold and lonely seat” where she can merge her feelings with her surroundings.159 She does not participate in the sports activities or conversations because she is a stranger to the country who depends on the mercy of others. In “The Emigrants” the topic is expanded into a decidedly political poem that discusses the French Revolution by presenting a tableau of the different classes who fled France and were then outcasts in England.160 Appropriately, the sea is troubled, dark, and stormy and people are cold, rugged, vagrant wretches. The culturally prescribed nature cure cannot help them: “and those years / Have taught me so much sorrow, that my soul / Feels not the joy reviving Nature brings”.161 In her Brighton poems, Smith turns to the outsiders, the migrants, and the victims of state 156

See Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 96. Ibid., 97f. 158 Ibid., 135–63. 159 Ibid., 97. 160 Smith was an outspoken liberal who supported the cause of the French Revolution. Even when the pressure of the market place increased as the French Revolution was viewed more critically by the English public, she still wrote in the spirit of the revolution, setting her novel The Old Manor House in America during the Revolutionary War. Only once she was disillusioned by the Terror in France did she portray European politics more ambivalently. In this regard, she stands out among the first generation of Romantics like Wordsworth, who quickly turned to support authority. See Curran, “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” 68ff. 161 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 151. 157

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institutions. Her focus is on the human being beyond safe boundaries (social or national). She questions the effects of nature on the human being. Sublime scenery does not suffice to elevate the mind, rather, it prompts the desire to merge with nature. Bathing cannot cure the body if the mind is too troubled. Smith’s subject is exiled (at home or abroad) and unsure of its own self.162 The breaking of the self is countered by a deterritorialization of the self: concentration on the margins and a desire to abandon selfhood with the help of the sea. Oftentimes the strong influence of sensibility on Charlotte Smith’s works renders her a typical pre-Romantic.163 Her rejection of the cultural striation of the sea-side in favor of the dark aspects of space and human nature along with the need for revolution and freedom is, however, decidedly Romantic and prefigures the Romantic longing for those smooth spaces still left in an increasingly territorialized world. While Smith dismisses the cultural practice of bathing, she seems to engage in the discourse of natural science by writing instructive poems on the flora and fauna of the country and the sea-side. In the mid-eighteenth century, the sea-side was not only seen as a cure but also as the place where the enigmas of the world could be discovered. Novalis’s and Hoffmann’s texts portray nature as a natural or an original sign that needs to be deciphered in order to achieve full cognizance of universal truths. Scientists are similarly fascinated by the search for the origin of the world. Different theories emerge that depart from simple biblical explanations (the Great Flood) and integrate the biblical creation of the Earth and the Flood with geological findings.164 Among these theories is the idea that mountains are the outcome of processes that took place at the bottom of the sea. Thus, the study of fossils becomes indispensable. Other theories attribute the rough mountains and rocks to a major catastrophe. The coastline becomes an important place for research because it is constantly changing. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the theory that the coast is the result of very long processes of transformation and the theory of catastrophe both determine the view of the sea. In England and in Germany an interest in geological formations changed the view of the sea-side that includes chalk cliffs. The rock formations became natural history books. Not only Caspar David Friedrich’s famous paintings of Rügen but also Smith’s poems, which mention the white and chalky cliffs,165 are expressions of this discourse. As a result of the heightened interest in geology, a middle-class enthusiasm for natural history evolved 162

See Curran, “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” 74. For a detailed analysis of the exiled person (not only in “The Emigrants” but also in her sonnets) see Monica Smith Hart, “Charlotte Smith’s Exilic Persona,” Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8.2 (2010): 306ff. 163 For a long time, Smith was appreciated only as a writer of sensibility or of pre-Romanticism. See Jacqueline Labbe, “Introduction,” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticsm, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) 2. 164 On the geological theories see Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 98–120, particularly, 100–103 and 108. 165 See for example “LXVI Written in a tempestuous night on the coast of Sussex” Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 58.

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between 1775 and 1800.166 The exploration of beaches, cliffs, and caves became a tourist’s pastime. The striation of the sea continued on its shore. In her poetry collection for children, Smith describes nature in great detail, but the posthumously published poem “Beachy Head” (1807) reveals her ambivalent position towards the geological discourse of the time: Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold Those widely spreading views, mocking alike The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art. And still, observing objects more minute, Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance. Tho' surely the blue Ocean (from the heights Where the downs westward trend, but dimly seen) Here never roll’d its surge. Does Nature then Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world? Or did this range of chalky mountains, once Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves Swell’d fathomless? What time these fossil shells, Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment Grew up a guardian barrier, ‘twixt the sea And the green level of the sylvan weald.167

The speaker finds sea-shells and chalk in the hills and wonders how they were transported to this place which the ocean does not reach. It seems Smith has read the contemporary theory of the origin of mountain formations. A footnote by Smith, however, negates this: “The appearance of sea-shells so far from the sea excited my surprise, though I then [she had found the shells many years before] knew nothing of natural history. I have never read any of the late theories of the earth, nor was I ever satisfied with the attempts to explain many of the phenomena which call forth conjecture in those books I happened to have had access to on this subject.”168 Smith’s descriptions of the wintry coasts bring to mind the theory that a great catastrophe such as the vengeful Flood left a crippled coastline in its wake. This excerpt, however, clearly contemplates the theory of transformation. Thus, judging from the books she has access to, Smith does have knowledge of the contemporary geological theories. She deliberately decides to exclude herself from this kind of spatial perception shifting the focus from what she 166

Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 111. Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 232. 168 Ibid., 232. 167

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considers “vague theories” and “vain dispute” in the next stanza to the true toils of mankind: work and war. In this sense, “Beachy Head” is also a political poem that once more prefers to thematize the margin of society instead of participating in a fashionable discourse. The late and unfinished poem “Beachy Head” does not only resist contemporary discourses, it is also Smith’s most intense description of smooth space. Nature is most forceful in “Beachy Head” and the desire to merge with the sea can be felt strongly. The passage quoted above decides the competition between nature and art, which Keats debated most prominently in “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, in favor of nature. Neither poesis nor pictura can match nature’s art. Man also loses against nature: while man restricts the freedom of other men, nature is full of harmony (a harmony more elaborate than “modulated airs / Of vocal science”).169 Nature, and in this respect Smith differs from the canonical Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, is presented as an alterity, “as an intricately detailed ecosystem that across time and space transcends human control”.170 The detailed descriptions of nature’s multiplicities and particulars in her poems for children also contribute to this vision of space in Smith’s work.171 Space and the subject seem less obviously intertwined in Smith’s poetry. There are no visions of the self as Aeolian harp (Coleridge and Shelley) or as wind (Shelley), but rather an admiration for space as a force within its own rights, for the otherness of space cannot be easily transgressed even though it instigates a desire for transgression. Consequently, Smith’s texts remain on the boundary between self and nature. The location of Beachy Head is not only the boundary between striated land and the smooth sea. It is also a geopolitical boundary between France and England, a place of war that symbolizes the fear of invasion and invokes questions of immigration, commerce, and smuggling.172 Because of its liminal position, the forces of de- and reterritorialization can be felt most strongly in this space. It is a fragile boundary. Striated space also figures in the poem. It seems to belong to an oppressive society. The city is contrasted with the sea-side: “polluted smoky atmosphere / And dark and stifling streets” hint at the modern industrial city that Romantics either idealize (as Wordsworth does in “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802”) or avoid, like many of the German Romantics. William Blake’s “London” and Mary Robinson’s “London’s Summer Morning” portray the city as a place of work and oppression that the speaker of “Beachy Head” tries to escape from. Her escape succeeds because she is apparently not bound by her body.173 The perspective of the poem keeps changing times and spaces. 169

Ibid., 219. Curran, “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” 76. 171 See ibid., 77. 172 Lily Gurton-Wachter, “‘An Enemy, I suppose, that Nature has made’. Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy,” European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009): 200. 173 Christoph Bode, Selbst-Begründungen. Diskursive Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik. I: Subjektive Identität (Trier: WVT, 2008) 253. 170

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The spaces of wilderness, of rudeness, of unfrequented paths and of darkness fascinate her. The irregular sea-side is full of ruins and wild brushwood. While the bathing resorts would soon (around 1810) build artificial paths and parades and pluck out the brushwood replacing it with benches so that the tourist could enjoy the best picturesque scenes comfortably,174 Smith’s Beachy Head is still smooth. The situation of her poetic persona at the seashore can be compared to Eichendorff’s Taugenichts at the shore of the (not yet rectified) Danube. There are picturesque descriptions in Smith’s poems,175 but they also present a different side of the sea. Smugglers dwell in the caves and the indigenous inhabitants go about their daily business. A hermit who lives in one of the caves could be seen as Smith’s nomadic figure for he understands the sea in a different way from the tourist, the exiled, or the migrant: Wandering on the beach, He learn’d to augur from the clouds of heaven, And from the changing colours of the sea, And sullen murmurs of the hollow cliffs, Or the dark porpoises, that near the shore Gambol'd and sported on the level brine When tempests were approaching: then at night He listen’d to the wind;176

Smooth space is directional, haptic rather than optic.177 The framed, predetermined view from a bench on a cliff that has been freed of nasty undergrowth – the perspective of the colonizer – is not smooth. The nomadic understanding of smooth space is “based on the wind and noise, the colors and sounds of the sea”.178 Wandering on the beach, understanding the sea through its changing colors and its sullen murmurs is the nomadic way of life. This is also the way Smith’s poems describe the sea: noises and colors prevail over descriptions of views. Subjects get as close to the sea as possible, sit amongst seaweed, on rocks or on the sand. They listen to the thundering sea driven by forces they can hardly understand but that they can feel.

174

See Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 264. “Beachy Head” starts from the perspective of an elevated speaker who is in control of nature, but this perspective is immediately qualified (through the use of the subjunctive and the undercutting of historical events). See Kari Lokke, “The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head,” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) 46. Furthermore, the striated perspective is qualified by the notion that is pointed out by several critics (for example Christoph Bode, “The Subject of Beachy Head,” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) 57–70). The speaker is reclining and not standing. Her perception is not through the eyes (the striated mode of seeing), but through the imagination. Also see Bode, Selbst-Begründungen, 235–61. 176 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 246. 177 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 528. 178 Ibid., 529.

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“Beachy Head” ends with the hermit’s/nomad’s death during his attempted rescue. His death is not pitied because he “[h]as to some better region fled for ever”.179 Again, the speaker associates death and the sea with each other. There is no personal wish to merge with the element like the hermit has, but the language of the poem indirectly expresses a desire for a-limitation. The beginning of the poem sheds light on this. The sublime scene at the opening of the poem evokes night-time: dispersing, melting, thinned.180 This description could be applied to the literary subject, the speaker or lyrical I in Smith’s poems. Contrary to first impressions, Smith’s poems are not only a sublimation of a difficult personal life and an outlet for the author’s grief and sorrow. As Stuart Curran, the editor of her poems, points out, 36 of the 92 poems in Elegiac Sonnets adopt a speaking voice that cannot be equated with the author Charlotte Smith.181 I discussed the voices in the Werther poems, but there are also rewritings of Petrarchan sonnets and numerous intertextual references to other texts (prominently featuring the graveyard poets and Shakespeare)182 that Smith uses consciously, as her annotations suggest. The annotations in footnotes add another voice to the ensemble.183 In the case of “Beachy Head”, the speaker is dispersed throughout the poem, thinned into various linguistic selves.184 Like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, the ‘I’ of the poem resur179

Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 247. Ibid., 217. 181 Curran, “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” 72. 182 Stuart Curran lists Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, Voltaire, Petrarch, Metastasio, Guarini, Ariosto, Goethe, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil as her main intertextual references. See Stuart Curran, “Intertextualities,” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) 176. 183 This voice does not necessarily have to be interpreted as Charlotte Smith’s own voice (as Tayebi suggests, see Tayebi, “Charlotte Smith and the Quest for the Romantic Prophetic Voice,” 427.) but rather as a stylized author’s voice similar to the voice in the margins of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”. 184 As Jaqueline Labbe points out, from the perspective of gender studies, the multiple voices form a “hybrid, fluid self” that is both feminine and masculine. This makes the speaker of “Beachy Head” as unreliable as a postmodern narrator. Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith. Romanticsm, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) 19, 142. She traces the speaker’s location in terms of masculine, feminine, and ‘mind’ presence (147). There is no unified voice, but a multiplicity or variety of persona. There is, however, a real speaker behind them, who seems de-personalized and dispassionate (160). Christoph Bode builds on Labbe’s notion of the “hybrid, fluid self” and stresses that it is not physically limited because it is an imaginary self that can see and go everywhere. While I think that Bode is correct with regard to the historical reflections and the merging of inner and outer space, there are still limits to Smith’s subject. She inscribes herself in the text and merges nature and society, as Bode argues. Her smooth gaze, however, is limited by the sea. See Bode, “The Subject of Beachy Head,” 62ff. In the expansion of his essay Bode stresses again that “Beachy Head” is not about the limitations of human subjectivity but about its Grenzenlosigkeit (boundlessness). Bode, Selbst-Begründungen, 259. I argue that it is about the subject’s a-limitation, her limits and their transgression.

180

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faces from the sea to share her feelings or memories (sometimes only in a footnote) only to then be submerged in nature or to spread out into different voices once more.185 Her movement through textual space is thus comparable to the form of a-limitation described for Melville’s novel. The poem already comprises a multiplicity of subjects, among them the hermit. In the end, smooth space claims the last subject of the poem, what remains is only a trace of the subject: the lines of the poem itself “Chisel’d within the rock”.186 It is noteworthy that the survivor of Moby-Dick clings to a similar sign: a coffin on which the theory of the world is inscribed. “Beachy Head”, chiseled into its own rock, also comprises a theory of the world – or rather an anti-theory. The merging of sign (engraving) and nature (rock or wood) related to the subject’s death (its crossing of the final frontier) is a self-reflexive movement that demonstrates the interdependencies of the three categories of a-limitation: sign, subject, space. Death by drowning, or the double-death of having one’s grave flushed out into the sea, are recurring fantasies in Smith’s poems. The sea is a space of death and thus a final limit not only in Smith’s poems but also in Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelly, Mary Robinson, Coleridge, and others. Many sailors and mariners drowned in shipwrecks along the coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. At the beginning of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer a ship crashes into the rocks. John Melmoth can hear the cries “of those who were swept away, or perhaps of those whose mind and body, alike exhausted, relaxed their benumbed hold of hope and life together”.187 The sight of death from the beach is horrible but sublime. When Melmoth dies in the end, the ocean claims him as well: “The ocean was beneath – the wide, waste, engulphing ocean.”188 The shipwreck on the coast seems to be the most frequently depicted death by water. Coleridge’s mariner is saved from his sinking ship as it approaches the coast. Smith’s poems also tell of shipwrecks on the coast: standing on the seashore the speaker observes the dying of a mariner: “Faint and more faint are heard his feeble cries, / ’Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies.”189 In this couplet, the human voice is replaced by the voice of the ocean (the tide). Another shipwreck scene (on the coast of Portland) tells of the wild waves that urge a vessel onto the shore.190 It is on the boundary between safe land and infinite sea where the catastrophe happens and where it is best witnessed. The sea as limit remains out of reach for the spectator on the coast. Smith’s poems speak of the desire for this limit, but seldom of its transgression. Only 185

Lokke understands the ending as the merging of the hermit, Smith, and her speaker. Lokke, “The Figure of the Hermit,” 47. 186 Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 247. 187 Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 64. 188 Ibid., 542. 189 From “XII Written on the sea shore. – October, 1784” Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, 20. 190 From “A descriptive ode, Supposed to have been written under the ruins of Rufus’s Castle, among the remains of the ancient Church on the Isle of Portland” ibid., 105.

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careful approaches from the shore are attempted. In a way, the shore is Smith’s threshold – the space she tries to preserve as smooth space and the space in which she finds her subjectivity best reflected. She cannot sail out into the smooth space where, about thirty years after the publication of “Beachy Head”, Shelley’s “Vision of the Sea” narrates a shipwreck on the open sea. A couple of years later, Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym tanks on the open sea only to travel into regions unknown where, following the ancient mariner, the ocean is chaotic and the absolute limit becomes visible in the white figure at the end of the novel. In the middle of the nineteenth century the white, faceless horror sinks Ahab’s ship on the open sea. Charlotte Smith’s early visions of the sea are those of the coast. Her inclusion in the canon of Romanticism clearly relativizes the notion of boundary crossing as a constitutive characteristic of Romanticism. It is much more the idea of a-limitation, including the reinstatement of boundaries after their crossing, the or unstable existence on the boundary, and the idea of an unattainable limit, that is expressed in Smith’s texts on the sea. With the continuing striation of the sea, those who desire smooth space need to become bolder and travel further as the limit retreats from them.

Multiplicity as the final frontier: Walt Whitman’s American landscape The cosmos as smooth space: Barbauld and Whitman Boundaries are spaces where possibilities are tested and the imagination approaches its limits. Mountains, forests, and the seashore feature most prominently among the marginal spaces in Romanticism, in which the subject can explore its own boundaries outside of the conventionally coded space of society. In the following section, I will race the horizon to Modernism with Walt Whitman, who adds the prairie and the city to the selection. His Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855 and appeared in several different editions until 1891 when Whitman died. It is a transitional text that goes further than the seashore and allows a first glance at the forms of a-limitation that will mark the twentieth century. Whitman’s descriptions of space (sea, plain, city, cosmos) are not entirely new. They have their roots in Romanticism, but they surpass previously observed boundaries. Even the remotest space, the solar system and the universe beyond that, the sky with its stars and its mythological planets, is a recurring theme in Romantic poetry. As early as 1773, Anna Letitia Barbauld dreams of this final frontier. Her “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” deals with the unconfined depths of space which prompt an exploration of man’s divinity. The speaker describes an imaginary trip to the stars:

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Seiz’d in thought, On fancy’s wild and roving wing I sail, From the green borders of the peopled earth, And the pale moon, her duteous fair attendant; From solitary Mars; from the vast orb Of Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk Dances in ether like the lightest leaf; To the dim verge, the suburbs of the system191

After passing Saturn, the speaker leaves the solar system. Like a spacecraft, fancy passes the system and enters deep space: “I launch into the trackless deeps of space, / Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear”.192 Expressions of the sublime dominate the lines quoted above: solitary, vast, giant, verge. The green borders of the earth are replaced by paleness, dimness, and then a new explosion of light and a new challenge for the imagination. “Here must I stop,” thinks the speaker and promptly ends the line only to continue his or her thought just a little further: Here must I stop, Or is there aught beyond? What hand unseen Impels me onward thro’ the glowing orbs Of habitable nature; far remote, To the dread confines of eternal night, To solitudes of vast unpeopled space, The deserts of creation, wide and wild; Where embryo systems and unkindled suns Sleep in the womb of chaos; fancy droops, And thought astonish’d stops her bold career.193

Fancy, which is a clearly gendered space vessel, is bound by thought and decides to leave the smooth space of colors, contradictions (desert of creation), and chaos behind. Humbled, the (female) speaker returns and calls on God to be merciful to her who only longs “to behold her maker”.194 The soul stops her “flight so daring”195 and returns to wait for the hour of her final departure: “the hour will come / when all these splendours bursting on my sight / Shall stand unveil’d, and to my ravish’d sense / Unlock the glories of the world unknown.”196 Here there is a desire for wideness and wildness and for a space that has not been striated yet because it is beyond the reach of human hands and even beyond the reach of minds. This longing is checked by rationality and timidity, two traits which are gradually abolished in Romanticism. When man becomes God-like,

191

Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, eds. William MacCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press,1994) 82f. 192 Ibid., 83. 193 Ibid., 83. 194 Ibid., 83. 195 Ibid., 83. 196 Ibid., 84.

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the heavens can be stormed as well. The Faustian heroes of the age struggle with this transgression. Even positive transcendence remains an approximation or a possibility. Barbauld’s speaker explicitly retreats behind the boundaries she previously surpasses. Eichendorff’s speaker in “Mondnacht”, for example, finds a semiotic solution for the observance of final limits. In “Mondnacht”’s final stanza, the soul starts its journey towards the stars and heavens, towards the home that Barbauld’s speaker, too, hopes to reach one day(“Perhaps my future home, from whence the soul, / Revolving periods past, may often look back”). No recall takes the soul in “Mondnacht” back, but the subjunctive (“als flöge sie nach Haus” ( as if she were flying home)) re-establishes the final limit. The two poems are two different examples of the same movement of transcendence (a soul approaching divinity) that work according to the same boundary mechanism of Romantic a-limitation. There are several boundaries in a-limitation. The interior boundaries are transgressed or eliminated as in the negation of limitation (‘alimitation’). The exterior limit, however, remains intact as in the existence of ‘a limit’. Whitman finds new ways of exploring this final limit. Charlotte Smith’s subjects stand on the shore, the boundary zone between land and the infinite, sublime ocean longing to merge with the water, and in Barbauld’s poem the speaker decides to wait until her soul’s time for transcendence comes. Walt Whitman’s speakers are unwilling to postpone their encounter with smooth space. In “Passage to India” Whitman writes: O we can wait no longer, We too take ship O soul, Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,) Caroling free, singing our song of God, Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.197

Many similarities connect Whitman’s stanza to Barbauld and to Romantic motifs. A soul and its subject embark on a journey through smooth space. Barbauld and Whitman both use the word “trackless” (Barbauld for deep space, Whitman for the sea) to indicate the boundaries of human navigation. No one has yet striated space with navigational charts where these souls travel. Both speakers employ unexplored space as a metaphor for transcendent space, an exploration of divinity. Although the speaker in “Passage to India” respects divinity (“But with the mystery of God we do not dally”198), a few lines later he is much bolder and more adventurous. Where Barbauld humbly ends her imaginary journey, Whitman goes one step further: O soul thou pleasest me, I thee, Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night, 197

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 321. 198 Ibid., 321.

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Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like waters flowing, Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite, Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over, Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee, I and my soul to range in range of thee.199

In Barbauld’s poem thoughts stop “fancy’s bold career”. In the quotation above, however, thought is an instrument of boundary crossing instead of the boundary itself. The antagonism between ratio and imagination (Blake), or between fancy and thought is abandoned in favor of a fluid and creative concept. A simile transforms thoughts into water and integrates them into the metaphor of smooth space. Whitman seems to anticipate the idea of brain waves. His thoughts transport the speaker into infinite regions where he immerses himself in the elements (air and water). Water as a medium for the transmission of thoughts or energy is a Romantic concept that was also encountered in the discussion of Novalis’s Ofterdingen, where Heinrich swims in a pond when he suddenly hears new thoughts in his mind (see chapter 3). For Heinrich, it is the first step towards becoming-woman and becoming-poet. While becoming-woman plays an important role in Whitman’s poetry as well, this concrete poem deals with the direct encounter with God. Through a figura etymologica the self, the soul, and God connect in the last line of the stanza. God’s space (his range) becomes one with the movement of the self and the soul (to range). From the beginning of the stanza to its end, a smooth movement between self, soul, and God takes place. That section, as well as the beginning of the stanza, seem to be addressed to the soul, which is closely linked to the self through the internal rhyme (me-thee). Their common journey to God is not interrupted – the entire stanza consists of one long sentence connected by commas. The last two lines end with the repetition of ‘thee’, which refers not to the soul but to God. Semiotically, subject (me), soul (thee), and God (thee) form one unity connected by the fluidity of smooth space and language. Barbauld hesitates. Her lines are interrupted (“Here must I stop” and “And thought astonished stops her bold career”). Whitman continues to the “stars, suns, systems,” and to the “shapeless vastnesses of space”.200 He continues despite God’s overwhelming power because his soul is a part of him that gives him access to the “orbs”, “Time”, “Death”, and “Space”.201 A greater trust in the self seems to lead to a more pronounced dissolution of the self. The poem ends with a call to travel to different landscapes (seas, rivers, woods, fields, mountains, prairies, rocks, the sky, the stars, the planets) and a call for immediate departure: Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? […] Sail forth – steer for the deep waters only, 199

Ibid., 321. Ibid., 321. 201 See ibid., 322. 200

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Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O my brave soul! O farther farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail!202

Again, it is the unexplored regions, the deep waters (or deep space), that are of interest. The speaker boldly sets off on his journey because he can be sure of himself and his soul. They are bound together (“for we are bound”) and headed where conventional mariners have not gone before. Water is a medium for a-limitation in Whitman’s poetry, just as it is in Barbauld’s and in Smith’s writings. “Passage to India” illustrates the transcendent crossing of boundaries.

Whitman’s merging with the sea The fascination with water (and deep space) is not an isolated phenomenon in Whitman’s poetry. Focusing mainly on the seashore of her home, Charlotte Smith could be called a poet of the sea. Whitman’s home also lies by the sea (Manhattan), and while his landscapes are more diverse, the sea still plays an important role in his poetry and poetics in general and particularly in his ideas of boundary crossings.203 A comparison of Whitman’s depiction of the sea with Smith’s visions reveals familiar topics: the walk along the shore, observance of the tide and natural surroundings, grievance, reflection on the situation of the self, Gothic implications (ghostly scenarios, shipwrecks), storms, and death. The chief difference, however, – in addition to the geographical and formal differences (the free verse that surpasses Smith’s formal experiments) – is that Whitman’s speaker does not only imagine or desire the merging, but performs it.204 Even the title of one of Whitman’s sea poems indicates the merging of subject and space, which entails the deterritorialization of the subject: “As I ebb’d with the ocean of life”. Self and sea become one in the tidal movement of the waves. For Whitman, standing enviously at the shore as Smith’s speakers do, comparing themselves to the 202

Ibid., 323. Killingsworth calls Whitman the “Island Poet”. See Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 98ff. 204 Angus Fletcher calls Whitman’s poems environmental poems not because they are about the environment (I would argue they are about the environment, about space and places), but because they are environments. His major argument lies in the idea of the “Whitman phrase”, i.e. that his free verse is a translation of the wave. See Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry. Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) 143–65. Thus it could be argued that not only the idea of “leaves” spatializes his texts in the sense of multiplicity, but that the sea as formal or functional principle deterritorializes his entire book.

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white corpses that were washed out of their graves, is insufficient. In terms of space, the shoreline separates Smith’s subjects from the ocean. In terms of language, the simile functions as a boundary (being like a corpse). Whitman’s speakers are becoming-ocean and becoming-debris. In the first section of “As I ebb’d with the ocean of life”, the speaker walks along the shoreline, but the second section initiates the dissolution of this line: As I wend to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.205

Self and space are more closely intertwined in this stanza than in Smith’s poems. All senses are activated when the speaker walks to an unknown shore (the poem starts with the known shores). He hears the dead in the waves. Unlike in Smith’s “Elegy”, this is not an illusion. Then the ocean becomes the agent coming closer and closer to the subject until the subject, perceiving itself as driftwood, becomes part of the beach. The encounter with the ocean leads the speaker to question his own worth as a poet.206 He admits that he knows not who he is nor does he understand the other objects (the not-I). A split self separated from nature merges with the ocean in an attempt to cope with the alienation resulting from Modernity. In the last section of the poem, the perspective has shifted from the speaker walking on the shore to the speaker lying as debris or driftwood on the beach while a ‘you’ observes the scene from the shore: “You up there walking or sitting, / Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet”.207 Smooth space serves as the metaphoric environment for a critical assessment of the self as poet. 205

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 202. Killingsworth distinguishes between the early island poetics and the later poems of personal crisis in which he includes “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”. See Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 99–131. He also argues that the poet withdraws from the process of merging (cf. 124f.). The becoming-driftwood could, in my opinion, still be considered a merging. Nathanson similarly reads the poem as a bitter reversal of Whitman’s earlier poetics. I would argue that there is a movement of subject a-limitation (from ‘I’ to ‘we’ to ‘you’), spatial a-limitation (from familiar to unfamiliar shores to a change of perspective) and concomitant questioning of the self and of language. Certainly, the ending of the poem may anticipate Foucault’s famous erasure of the subject like a face drawn in the sand at the end of the The Order of Things, but that only means that the poem follows familiar patterns of subject a-limitation. Thus, the self-destructive element in the poem is not new, although its pessimistic tone is unusual. The devaluation of subject dissolution may perhaps be an effect of Modernity and the irreversible loss of transcendence (the speaker wants the father (i.e. God) to answer, but the outcome of his efforts is not related). Cf. Tenney Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence. Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass (New York: New York University Press, 1992) 451ff. 207 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 204.

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An even deeper immersion in the sea takes place in section 22 of “Song of Myself”: You sea! I resign myself to you also – I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me, We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. 208

Despite the pronounced notion of the self as a solid being that laughs at the prospect of dissolution,209 the speaker gives himself up to the sea. By anthropomorphizing the sea, the speaker intensifies its erotic connotations and dissolves the distinction between the subject and nature.210 Waves become “crooked inviting fingers” and their motions are sexual. In the next stanza, the sea and the self are approaching orgasm (“breathing broad and convulsive breaths”)211 until they merge completely: “I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases”.212 The erotic connotations of bathing, which are not yet mentioned in Charlotte Smith’s poems, are spelled out in Whitman’s “Song”. In England, women were immersed in the water by men. Corbin explains the practice: “The female bathers held in the arms of powerful men and awaiting penetration into the liquid element, the feeling of suffocation, and the little cries that accompanied it all so obviously suggested copulation” that bathing was thought to be indecent by some doctors.213 For men, bathing focused on the confrontation with the element and on physical exertion: “The virile exaltation that a man experienced just before jumping into the water was like that of an erection”.214 A century later, similar sexual connotations still exist. Whitman’s speaker, however, does not bathe in the masculine way. His (sexual) merging is based on his surrender to the sea, his being lured into the element and becoming fluid and dynamic just like the water itself in the act of their merging. In fact, section 11 of his “Song” offers another perspective on bathing: a woman is watching bathing men and imagines her hand passing over their bodies.215 Instead of the male gaze (aided by binoculars), female desire dominates the bathing scene. While propriety (and a dislike for institutionalized bathing) forbade Smith to write about the sea in this way, Whitman ignored propriety (and the critics). He is famous for his explicit depiction of hetero- and homosexual love. His allusions to sexuality often involve 208

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 45. For a discussion of subjectivity in “Song of Myself” see chapter 6. 210 Another interesting example of the intimate contact between self and nature can be found in “This Compost”; for a detailed discussion see Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 19–22. On the trope of personification and its environmental rhetoric also see chapter 2 of the same study. For an ecocritical perspective on the discussed section see Killingsworth pp.50f. 211 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 46. 212 Ibid., 46. 213 Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, 74. 214 Ibid., 77. 215 See Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 37. 209

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genitalia. There are, however, other erogenous zones as well.216 In this regard, Whitman surpasses conventional ideas of heteronormative intercourse. The encounter with the sea almost achieves Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of nonhuman sex that does not rely on genitalia, but on a fluid desire that enables multiple experiences.217 Whitman explains his merging with the sea a few lines later in “Song”: “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.”218 In this appreciation of both transcendence and transgression, which is also expressed in other topics in Leaves of Grass, one aspect of the Modernist idea of a-limitation is evident. Traces of the combination of transcendence and transgression can already be found in Blake’s Jerusalem, but there is still a narrative voice that guides the reader to the right form of transcendence (giving up selfhood and merging with Jesus). Another parallel between Smith’s Romantic smooth space and Whitman’s Modernist-Romantic space is the appreciation of space in its own right. For these two poets nature is not just a source of inspiration or something that is to be conquered by the mind or body of man. The differences between them, however, become apparent when the other spaces depicted in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass are considered. First of all, Whitman seems closer to nature than Smith. As the discussion of Whitman’s notion of the sea shows, his speaker merges with nature and becomes sea, or driftwood.219 Secondly, Smith decides to avoid striation and instead depicts nature as a wild and dangerous but superior and harmonious space. Save for one exception (which expresses her discomfort with spas) she does not mention the populated beaches and retreats into untouched smooth spaces instead. Eichendorff pursues a similar strategy. His heroes traverse mountains and woods. They encounter mysterious and mythical subjects and rest in enchanted castles. However, even in these texts that seem to avoid striated space, there are traces of striation: the city (only seen from afar in Smith and smoothed by the somnambulist Taugenichts in Eichendorff), the state and its wars, borders, and boundaries, and the effects of capitalist society (working versus starving in poverty). Not all Romantic writers are as careful with the effects of spatial striation. Revolutionary texts battle the state, more realistic descriptions of the city point to the suffering and crime it hosts, slavery and war are also not ignored. Whitman provides an example of a different understanding of smooth and striated space. Smooth space is not reimparted through

216

See Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 182. 217 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 324f. 218 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 46. 219 Whitman’s precise relationship with nature in an ecological sense is debatable. Different editions of Leaves of Grass allow for various conclusions in ecocritical writings on Whitman. For a discussion of the most recent criticism see M. Jimmie Killingsworth, “Nature,” A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 311–14. Killingsworth himself argues that nature becomes increasingly abstract in the later works. See Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 53.

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nostalgia, avoidance, or the rejection of striated space. Whitman embraces all spaces and thus deterritorializes them.

Whitman’s prairie as conceptual smooth space Among the numerous landscapes listed in many poems (for example the list in “Passage to India”), some are discussed in separate poems. While German and English Romantics showed an obsession with forests and mountains, their peaks and their depths, Whitman’s American landscape includes the prairie. Deleuze and Guattari name the steppe among those spaces opposed to the striated city that are “sites of a contest between the smooth and the striated”220 because they invoke patterns of the smooth but are also subject to striation. As a typical American landscape, the prairie stands for open space and freedom. In Specimen Days Whitman writes about the prairie: “I am not so sure but the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape”.221 But it is also a space that undergoes striation: “Speaking generally as to the capacity and sure future destiny of that plain and prairie area (larger than any European kingdom) it is the inexhaustible land of wheat, maize, wool, flax, coal, iron, beef and pork, butter and cheese, apples and grapes—land of ten million virgin farms—to the eye at present wild and unproductive—yet experts say that upon it when irrigated may easily be grown enough wheat to feed the world.”222 Whitman sees striation as a positive phenomenon in this quotation. Yet, the prairie also stands for the push to the frontier and the extinction of the true nomads of America, the Native Americans. There was an awareness of the disappearance of former inhabitants, both human and animal, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, suggested, for example, by William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Prairies” (1834). The prairies are “[B]oundless and beautiful”, but they have also been deserted by Native Americans and by the bison and are now awaiting new settlers.223 Whitman 220

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 531. Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1892) 150. Whitman frequently distinguishes between European and American landscapes. Nature in general served as a means for national identification in the heterogeneous nation. See Coates, Nature, 104–09. 222 Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 150. In his study on Whitman and ecopoetics, Killingsworth identifies both a mystic attachment to the earth and a tendency to see nature as a resource. See Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 11f. 223 William Cullen Bryant, The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, ed. Henry C. Sturges (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903) 130–33. Also see Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 128. The novels by James Fenimore Cooper also depict the noble savage’s expulsion from his native land and the ecological consequences (deforestation and the depletion of wildlife). While Cooper may point to the ethical and ecological problems of progress, he still considers “the price is worth paying for the blessings of civilization” (Coates, Nature, 107). Whitman holds a similar position concerning westward expansion and the concomitant extinction of Native Americans. See Ed 221

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avoids addressing the issue in his poetry. In “Starting from the Paumanok” the speaker calls for progress and pauses only for a brief moment to consider the inhabitants of his “vast, trackless spaces”: “The red aborigines, / Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, / Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa” and so on.224 In this passage Native Americans are clearly associated with smooth space: rain, wind, nature. In the spatial framework of A Thousand Plateaus, Native Americans would be the prototypical nomad, who cling to smooth space, inhabit places and thereby create smooth space as much as they are created by space.225 In Whitman they stand for smooth space, but they also become marginalized, almost irrelevant. Dana Phillips points out, “Whitman rather neatly reads the ‘red aborigines’ out of existence”.226 Thus the prairie is a place that signifies both: the smooth space of a-limitation and the space of conquest and European progress that entails the extinction of nomadic existence. The white subject appropriates nomadic existence and the understanding of smooth space only to a certain degree, as is demonstrated by Whitman’s prairie poems. “Night on the prairies” begins with a located scene of life in smooth space: “The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low, / The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets”.227 Yet, the smooth is already striated by the fact that it is emigrants who are portrayed rather than indigenous nomadic people. The migrant is looking for work – and in America for freedom and riches. He has aims, goals, and dreams and he is a typical American figure. Even in the nineteenth century the cultural imaginary of America was that of mobility. Europeans perceived American life as fast and unstable: places and occupations changed at high speed. Roads, rail tracks, and channels were quickly built to insure an even faster pace of trade and movement in general.228 Fluidity and the dynamics of existence are countered by the excessive striation of space, in which even Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson participated. In “The Young American”, a lecture delivered at the Mercantile Library Association in 1844, he Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 57. 224 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 27. 225 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421. 226 Dana Phillips, “Nineteenth-Century Racial Thought and Whitman’s ‘Democratic Ethnology of the Future’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49.3 (1994): 312. Phillips points out that Whitman is always read as the poet of multiplicity, but that he severely stereotypes non-Anglo-Saxon races. Ed Folsom makes a similar point. Whitman never succeeded in composing a poem about Native Americans; instead, he uses the concept for his own purposes, the outcome being something between a stereotypical Indian, an assimilated American, and finally a white savage. What remains are only native words of places. On Whitman’s ambivalent relationship with Native Americans see Folsom, Walt Whitman's Native Representations, 55–98. Whitman’s multiplicity, much as Deleuze and Guattari’s, remains a concept and not a practical application. 227 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 344. 228 See Gert Raeithel, Geschichte der nordamerikanischen Kultur. Vol. 2. Vom Bürgerkrieg bis zum New Deal 1860–1930, (Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins, 2002) 77f.

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speaks of the railroads as “a network of iron”.229 His plans for the prairie also contradict the general understanding of Emerson as an early eco-poet: “This great savage country should be furrowed by the plough, and combed by the harrow; these rough Alleganies should know their master; these foaming torrents should be bestridden by proud arches of stone; these wild prairies should be loaded with wheat”.230 Stronger metaphors for the striation of space can hardly be imagined. Tilling, mining, building, hunting, trading, and growing are the tasks of the young Americans, who at one point came to the country to be free. The migrant’s existence may be dynamic, but it is certainly not nomadic or smooth. Whitman’s poem does not explicitly speak of the conquering of nature (as for example “Song of the Redwood-Tree” does),231 but striation is hinted at in the figure of the migrant. We could say that the poem describes smooth space confronted with striation. Another prairie poem by Whitman stresses the smooth qualities of this particular space. In “A prairie sunset” a landscape free of people is described by a speaker who is not embodied: Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn, The earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power consign’d for once to colors; The light, the general air possess’d by them – colors till now unknown, No limit, confine – not the Western sky alone – the high meridian – North, South, all, Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.232

Perception is guided by colors that express amplitude and multiform – metaphors of multiplicity. The manuscript shows that “possess’d” used to be ‘diffused’, which suggests an even stronger image of boundary crossing.233 The aspects of striation (directions, meridian) are countered by the impression of unlimited space which these prairie colors create. The analysis of the two poems together clearly shows that the prairie is a smooth space for Whitman – even if it is confronted with striation. 229

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 2, eds. Alfred Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979) 223. 230 Ibid., 227. This quotation expresses the ambivalent attitude of the Romantics towards nature that is also reflected in the idea that human spirituality is the highest value and nature serves only as a means to explore this spirituality. Thus, nature should not stand in the way of the human progress it inspires. For a discussion of this idea in Emerson’s Nature see Coates, Nature, 135f. Similar attitudes are diagnosed for English Romantics and their male sublime (see the previous section). 231 For a detailed discussion of this poem focusing on the notions of progress and nature as resource see Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 64ff. Like Phillips, Killingsworth also points to the racist connotation of the manifest destiny doctrine expressed in this poem: westward expansion leads to what Whitman calls “culminating man”, a race surpassing the indigenous population. 232 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 400. 233 The Walt Whitman Archive provides digitized manuscripts of Whitman’s poems. See Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, eds., The Walt Whitman Archive. Lincoln. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. For “A Prairie Sunset” see: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/uva.00167.001_large.jpg [accessed 14.04.2011]

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The first poem (“Night on the prairies”) continues with the familiar pattern of a-limitation. A place and a group of people are described. From this group, a speaker emerges in the next line: “I walk by myself – I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never realized before”.234 Space triggers a reflection in this self that leads to the desire for dissolution expressed in the last lines of the poem: “O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot, / I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death”.235 Smooth space can function similarly to sublime space insofar as it can lead to thoughts about annihilation. Yet smooth space is a different concept from sublimity because it also has implications of place. It is not just an intellectual or a philosophical metaphor, but also a concept that raises questions about the ecological and economical construction of spaces and subjects. In this case, the metaphoric side of smooth space dominates: deterritorialized space entails the deterritorialization of the subject.236

Death, the city, and multiplicity The previous section on Charlotte Smith demonstrated how intimately smooth space (in her case the sea) and death are connected. Both the sea (see “Passage to India”) and the prairie have a similar effect on the subjects in Whitman’s poems. Death, however, carries different meanings for the two poets. In Smith’s poems, death means relief from a life of hardship and suffering and the reunion with loved ones. For Whitman, death seems to be just another mode of existence, which possibly leads to a deeper understanding of the cosmos. Like Ishmael and Ahab, like the narrator of Der goldne Topf, like the novices of Sais, like Barbauld’s speaker, Whitman understands death as one epistemological possibility. He comes closer to the final limit, the exterior limit of alimitation, than any of them. A very short poem demonstrates the permeability of the boundaries between life and death in Whitman’s poetry: Pensive and faltering, The words the Dead I write, For living are the Dead, (Haply the only living, only real, And I the apparition, I the spectre.)237

234

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 344. Ibid., 345. 236 This has also been asserted for the previously discussed Romantic wanderings: “Attention as loafing and wandering, however, tends to de-emphasize the ego.” Eric Wilson, Romantic Turbulence. Chaos, Ecology, and American Space (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 134. 237 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 346. 235

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By reversing the perspective from that of the poet contemplating death to that of the spectre contemplating those who are alive, Whitman anticipates the modern Gothic, which gives a voice to the dead and to liminal creatures. In an almost Postmodernist way, he points to the uncertainty of reality. The self is put in parenthesis and thus becomes a semiotic echo or spectre of the dead who lie outside this typographic boundary. The poem also questions the word “dead” as an adequate signifier for a concept that is more dynamic than its conventional meaning suggests. In “Song of Myself” Whitman writes of death, “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier”.238 This means that death is not a point of no return but is part of becoming. If the writing poet can be a spectre or an apparition, if he can speak about the living from the realm of the dead, then death is not a final state but part of the idea of progress. The poems in Whispers of Heavenly Death describe death as an unknown region, as a state of satisfaction, or as something to be congratulated upon.239 So far, several ideas come together in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that suggest a Romantic notion of a-limitation, but there are also traces of Modernist concepts of alimitation. In Whitman’s time the striation of space could no longer be denied or avoided. Peter Coates writes (with regard to Emerson’s essay Nature): Nature also suggests that American Romantics, despite stock anti-modern noises, were less disenchanted with modernity than their counterparts in Britain and Germany. In common with many other nineteenth-century white Americans, Emerson believed in the providential discovery of America and the desirability, indeed inevitability, of human evolution beyond primitive conditions.240

The American idea of progress, of Manifest Destiny even, shows how de- and reterritorialization belong together. The wide open, unexplored country or sea became both frontier and horizon and are thus striated.241 But beyond them lies a new undiscovered country, a new smooth space, which is then again striated by commerce until excessive capitalism deterritorializes it again. Deprivation and environmental destruction went hand in hand with the admiration and celebration of nature. One of the important American ideals, progress, counteracts becomings. “To become is not to progress or regress along a series”,242 write Deleuze and Guattari. Progress and becoming are both part of the American notion of a-limitation that represents an accelerated alternation between de- and reterritorialization. Sometimes notions of becoming dominate; other times progress prevails. That is why Whitman’s position on death is not only Romantic 238

Ibid., 34. Wilson uses Whitman’s theory of the atom to conceive the same notion as mere redistribution of matter. See Wilson, Romantic Turbulence, 135. 239 See Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 338–46. 240 Coates, Nature, 136. 241 On the function of the horizon as an encompassing element in striation see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 546. 242 Ibid., 262.

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but also typically American: risk in the name of progress belongs to the American way of life in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, death still exerts a spiritual fascination; on the other hand, people have become so accustomed to death around them that they accept it very easily. Death does not stand in the way of progress. On the contrary, it might actually be a part of progress.243 Physical (and metaphysical) expansion is part of progress, as are industrialization and urbanization. Despite different processes of urbanization, the city is not only a problematic space in German and English Romanticism.244 Before the Industrialization and before Romanticism the European city was associated with dirt, pollution, health hazards, and environmental problems. On the other side of the Atlantic, industrialization and urbanization happened more quickly and simultaneously.245 Nineteenth-century America avoided the fictional depiction of urbanity as well. If all Romantic texts are considered to be composing one textual space, the city appears only as a few specks in a large natural space: Poe, Melville (Pierre), Whitman. These specks, however, are points of striation that reimpart smooth space. The section on Taugenichts illustrated how striated nature already is: marshes are drained, rivers are rectified, forests are cut down to make way for farming. Emerson’s vision of a network of iron in “The Young American” adds further technical advancements to the processes of striation. At this point, city 243

See Raeithel, Vom Bürgerkrieg bis zum New Deal 1860–1930, 79f. Killingsworth also points out that Whitman’s concept of death, which he describes as the alternation between the end of living and the reunion with the earth, is part of the conventional pastoral rhetoric of the time, which can, to a certain degree, also be found in the poetry of e.g. William Cullan Bryant. However, he departs from it because his conception of nature is more pluralistic: the poet is one spirit among many. While this approach certainly supports this chapter’s assumption that Whitman represents multiplicity, it also has to be viewed with caution. Whitman also participates in the imaginary striation of space and in the transformation of nature into landscape. The shamanistic attitude that Killingsworth attributes to Whitman can only be found in certain poems. Cf. Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 111ff. 244 Whitman’s depiction of the city is sometimes contrasted with Wordsworth’s London in order to point to the differences between English and American Romanticism. But even Whitman was celebrating a city that no longer existed – an idealized version of a growing metropolis. See for example Malcom Andrews, “Walt Whitman and the American City,” The American City. Literary and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Vision Press and St. Martin's Press, 1988) 179–97. (Clarke also deals with a problem that continues to fascinate Whitman scholars: the relation between individual and society, or part and whole. See the section on Deleuze and Whitman in this chapter.) Also see Brand’s discussion of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. While Wordsworth is frightened of “the incomprehensible multiplicity and transcience of urban impressions […] Whitman imaginatively embraces the crowds” (176). His view of urbanity is, however, still a nineteenth-century one. See Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 171ff. 245 Christoph Bernhardt, “Umweltprobleme in der neueren europäischen Stadtgeschichte,” Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century. Umweltprobleme in europäischen Städten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Christoph Bernhardt, 2nd ed. (Münster: Waxmann, 2004) 6.

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space functions as an opposite that deterritorializes the previously striated space again. Smooth and striated still work like this in the twenty-first century: the Alps with their numerous marked paths, their funiculars, and their ski slopes are only smooth because they are wedged inbetween cities.246 In the nineteenth century, cities were not nearly as neatly striated as they are in Europe and North America today, but they gradually became more organized when hygiene improved as drainage and heating systems, pavements, municipal waste management, and the relocation of industry allowed for a cleaner city space.247 Leveling and gridding made cities more efficient. Gunther Barth points out that the reordering of cityscape that Whitman witnessed turned into an obsession with parceling, building, and rebuilding.248 Washington D.C. is an early example of urban striation as it was developed on the drawing board. Exhibitions of the city in the nineteenth century show that is was perceived as striated: scale models and circular panoramas order city space for the spectator.249 Rarely, however, is the city the subject of fiction or even poetry. While some American Romantics retreat into the woods to compensate for the fast and striated life in the city, Whitman writes about it.250 As a citizen of New York, Whitman witnessed technological advances first hand and seems to develop a technological sublime in some of his poems.251 The speaker in “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” addresses the contrast between nature and urban space only to proclaim: “I adhere to my city”.252 What fascinates the speaker about striated space? He seems to like its deterritorializing forces: the variations in the crowd 246

At the same time, the city also had a striating effect on the surrounding area. The hinterland had to provide water and receive waste. See Joel A. Tarr, “Urban History and Environmental History in the United States. Complementary and Overlapping Fields,” Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century. Umweltprobleme in europäischen Städten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Christoph Bernhardt, 2nd ed. (Münster, New York, München and Berlin: Waxmann, 2004) 29. 247 Bernhardt, “Environmental Problems,” 11ff. 248 See Gunther Barth, City People. The Rise of the Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 31. The grid plan Barth describes (rectangular parcels of land) is a striation of urban space. Initially, the city grew chaotically in all directions, but city planning changed this and organized space as well as the life of its inhabitants. 249 See William Pannapacker, “The City,” A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 51. 250 Whitman has been called the “first urban poet” (Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman. A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980) 107.) quoted in Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 137. For further discussion of Whitman’s urbanity see Killingsworth’s study. Killingsworth points out the permeable boundary between urban and natural space in Whitman’s poetry that supports the interdependent relation between smooth and striated space (see 140f.). Brand discusses Whitman as a flâneur from a biographical angle. She shows that Whitman’s participation in the discourse of photography had an influence on his depiction of the city. Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 156–85. 251 See Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 76. 252 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 244.

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and the endless faces and streets. In “Mannahatta”, the same idea of variation and multiplicity is celebrated: “Numberless crowded streets” and “countless masts”, the immigrants, the millions of people with “manners free and superb” and the different views of the city varying according to season.253 These poems are written in a Romantic sentiment that idealizes the city with which Whitman himself became increasingly disillusioned. Urban space is smoothed by the idea of diversity and multiplicity. This is one strategy of deterritorializing the city that bears Romantic traces of idealization. The city is portrayed as a space of commerce, work, and capitalism, but the sentiment seems to be one of freedom and joyful enterprise. Not only Whitman’s native city, New York, but also the other great cities of the world are included in this positive view of striation: “I see the cities of the earth and make myself at random a part of them”,254 Whitman writes in “Salut au monde”. Similar images of merging to those in Whitman’s nature poems occur in the description of cities. Becoming part of the city or becoming fluid and being absorbed by it (as in “Sparkles from the Wheel”) seem as natural as becoming-sea. Work as a striating power is also a part of Whitman’s city space that is smoothed by multiplicity. In his long catalogues, different occupations are listed as part of a great nation into which the individual is integrated: “Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd”, the speaker calls out to the people of Brooklyn. There is also a darker view of the city’s transgressive elements that counters the seemingly cheerful acceptance of striation and points towards a new way of deterritorializing city space. “The Sleepers” begins with such a view: I wander all night in my vision, Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers, Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.255

Like the Taugenichts, the speaker moves through space in a dream-like fashion. He is affected by the same confusion and lack of orientation. This is not the synoptic view from above that characterizes striated space. What he sees, however, departs from the mystic city in Taugenichts and begins to resemble Modernist depictions such as Malte Lauridds Brigge’s impressions of Paris: corpses, drunkards, onanists, the wounded, the insane, and the dying. Loving families seem to sleep next door to prisoners and murderers. The speaker merges with all of these sleepers: “I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, / And I become the other dreamers”.256 Assuming different personas (politicians as well as criminals), the speaker becomes a woman and experiences a sexual encounter with a man at the end of which he approaches the state of becoming-imperceptible: “Be careful darkness! already what was it touch’d me? / I 253

Ibid., 361. Ibid., 117. 255 Ibid., 325. 256 Ibid., 326. 254

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thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one, / I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.”257 He continues his vision by exploring different deaths and more persons, all of which seem beautiful to him. They are beautiful because they embody the principle of diversity in unity discussed earlier with regard to Blake’s Jerusalem: “The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite – they unite now”.258 The speaker can wake up from his merging and the smooth space of city dreams. He has approached the liminal regions of the Modernist city that depict the chaos, the suffering, the confusion, and has safely returned to a Romantic vision that negotiates between subject and dissolution, between individuality and (divine) unity. The last section of “The Sleepers” is a vision of equality, reconciliation, and the dissolution of spatial boundaries: “The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, / They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed”.259 The nakedness prepares the sleepers for their flight across spatial boundaries which are political, ideological, and biological. The reconciliation and the healing are universal. With the approach of day, the vision ends, but the speaker vows to return to the night and its powers of boundary crossing: “Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? […] I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes, / I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you”.260 The heterogeneous and non-hierarchical assemblage of people includes the criminal. Compared to the previous city texts, for example the city description in Poe’s “A Man of the Crowd”, the Modernist element of a-limitation consists in the rhizomatic multiplicity in contrast to the order and categorization that the narrator in Poe’s story attempts. Poe’s narrator invents categories to establish an ordered tableau of the city space. The criminal elements and the poorer quarters fascinate him more than the clerks and businessmen, but the important point is that he distinguishes between them. Blake’s Jerusalem comprises a multiplicity as well (numerous speakers, changing persona, endless lists of names and places). Despite their ambiguities (for example Jerusalem as angel and whore or the character of Los’s spectre) the overall framework of values allows for the continuing creation of oppositions that generate each other. The list in “The Sleepers” deliberately avoids establishing hierarchies or preferences. In the last section, all remaining privileges are annulled by reconciling typical hierarchies (motherdaughter, father-son, master-slave). And yet it is only a dream. While, according to A Thousand Plateaus, becoming should not just occur in the imagination,261 the dream is an important component of Romantic becomings. Under the guise of the night, the Taugenichts can walk through Rome in safety. Only in twilight or during the night can Florio experience the transfor257

Ibid., 327. Ibid., 331. 259 Ibid., 331. 260 Ibid., 332. 261 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 262. 258

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mations of the girl-woman-sign, and only in the artificial light of the street lamps does the narrator in Poe’s story begin to merge. Heinrich von Ofterdingen has his first glimpse of becoming-woman in a dream, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s imagination carries her beyond the solar system. Ishmael’s childhood narrative of physical a-limitation is the dream of a ghostly hand. The list extends beyond the scope of the texts analyzed in this study: Coleridge’s fragment poem “Kubla Khan” is another notorious dream-vision. Romantic a-limitation often requires the night or a dream as a space for becoming that also offers the possibility of return. The imagination can then be checked (Barbauld), the dangerous seduction is averted in daylight (Eichendorff), and life can continue until night falls again (Whitman). Whitman’s “The Sleepers” shows that the day-night boundary changes city space and facilitates the dissolution of hierarchies into multiplicities. This boundary is an interior boundary that can be transgressed many times. When it shows traces of dissolution and uncertainty (Am I awake or asleep?), it is approaching the exterior limit. Whitman employs his lists of multiplicities not only in dreamy night visions. “Song of Myself” is such a catalogue of day- and night-time that approaches the exterior limit of language through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous subjects and spaces. Section 33 is a deictic apotheosis of the speaker: “Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at, / What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass”,262 are the opening words of the section. The anadiplosis of “what I guess’d at” initiates a crossing of semiotic boundaries. On the level of content, the self becomes space and expands into a multiplicity of spaces: “My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, / I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision”.263 “Afoot” can mean both traveling by foot and existing. This means that the speaker is both moving along with his vision and has become the vision. His becomings are no longer imaginary. With a few prepositions (by, along) the spatial exploration turns into a list in which each line begins with either a preposition or with “where”. Different landscapes rapidly change in the wild flight (countryside, ocean, city, and prairie) and the seasons change as well. As in Taugenichts, movement in space changes time. In this case, the changes are more dramatic: the images change from icy trees to lazy mid-day swimming in just two lines. The list is interrupted by another explanatory passage: Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest, Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.264 262

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 55. Ibid., 55. 264 Ibid., 58. 263

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The fast journey and its spatio-temporal transgression initiate a process of subject alimitation. The speaker moves into open space and inverses the process of childbirth. After the passage quoted above, the self as ‘I’ becomes more dominant in the text as almost every line begins with ‘I’ (visit, fly, anchor, go hunting). Then a ‘we’ alternates with the ‘I’ until the ‘I’ turns to the description of another subject, a sailor, claiming at the end of the stanza: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there”.265 Only by being there can the self become the other subject. It experiences the same thing on the battlefield: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person […] I am there again. […] I take part, I see and hear the whole”.266 This section of “Song of Myself” demonstrates the interdependence of spatial and subject a-limitation that is also semiotically realized through the enumeration of clauses connected by commas.

The a-signifying semiotics of Leaves of Grass Because of this syntax and his free verse, Whitman is known as a forerunner of Modernist language experiments that test the boundaries of syntax, grammar, and meaning beyond the previously permissible poetic variations. His own stance on semiotics is expressed most comprehensively in “A Song of the Rolling Earth”. It is a “song of the rolling earth, and of words according”267 at whose outset the speaker makes clear that he is not talking about words in the conventional sense of words on a page or in a book: “No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea, / They are in the air, they are in you”.268 Bodies and elements and the speaker himself are words. Whitman offers a pansemiotic notion in which everything is a meaningful sign – everything but conventional language. “Song of the Open Road” expresses the same thought of the Earth as a sign that seems incomprehensible at first but is in fact divine and full of meaning.269 Is this the same pansemiotic view of magic signs encountered in the German Romantic tradition (Eichendorff and Novalis)? Whitman goes one step further by moving the magic sign away from signification towards a Postmodernist idea of a postsignifying diagrammatical language. In this case, the semiotic subject en265

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 60. 267 Ibid., 176. 268 Ibid., 176. 269 In this case, Whitman also takes part in the Romantic discourse on hieroglyphics. See chapter 3 and Melville’s interest in hieroglyphics and Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence, 215, as well as John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics. The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) 20–40. Whitman participates in the discourse on Champollion’s decipherment and was, like Emerson, influenced by Swedenborg. He concurs with Emerson on the significance of the concealed signs of nature and the poet’s duty to unlock them. The present study argues that the firm belief in a key to natural language is lost in Whitman just like in the despairing narrator Ishmael. 266

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countered several times in the discussed Romantic texts is approaching the limit of language. Natural signs cannot be unlocked or reproduced by symbolic language, they are “untransmissible by print”270 and cannot be understood through conventional language. Whitman expresses a familiar discontent with written language when he figures it as the final stage of a fall from original and natural language, but he goes even further saying: I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words, All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth, Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth, Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch. I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, It is always to leave the best untold.271

When he tries to tell them the best, the organs of speech fail him. The belief in symbolic and arbitrary language that can be made natural again and can give access to the truth is shattered. Whitman rejects the printed “book-words” in favor of a language that is alive.272 He is not proposing a return to natural language through the magic word, but to a new concept of the body and of nature that is still deeply invested in Romantic semiotics and the idea of a presignifying semiotics in which there is no boundary between signifier and signified, but which dies bear the first traces of a postsignifying regime where symbolic language is given up and meaning is no longer interpreted.273 Print and spoken language seek to represent something. Whitman, however, calls for the presentation of unspoken meanings. The function of arbitrary signs in the process of repre-

270

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 177. Ibid., 179. 272 Ibid., 223. Whitman shares the rejection of book-learning with Emerson, who tried to emancipate American culture from European traditions (see for example The American Scholar) and favored nature as a source of inspiration. A parallel reading with The Primer of Words (the notebook version of An American Primer) suggests that Whitman could also mean the language really spoken (as opposed to the printed language) by Americans. See Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks. Vol.3. Diary in Canada, Notebooks, Index, ed. William White (New York: New York University Press, 1978) 734–35. On this reading see James Perrin Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) 41. Nathanson argues in a similar manner: voice and print are oppositions in Whitman. See Nathanson, Whitman's Presence, 162–278. These readings, however, do not account for the rejection of the audible word in the poem. Nathanson claims that Whitman does not reject language, but only what Austin calls “constative utterances”. Performative language (linked to voice and the body), however, is accepted by Whitman (176). I would like to argue along similar lines: post-signifying diagrammatical language is employed by Whitman to avoid signifying arbitrariness. 273 See Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence, 197–99. Nathanson argues that Whitman’s language theory is a return to origins, but also acknowledges that Whitman claims in “America’s Mightiest Inheritance” that it is impossible to trace the origins of language. 271

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sentation is questionable because the idea of representation itself is questioned by Whitman.274 Whitman cannot completely escape the arbitrary sign, even though his aim is a natural language. In fact, at the beginning of his interest in language theory he is optimistic, celebrating the concomitant evolution of the English language and the American nation. He studies the theory of language and expresses his thoughts in the essay “America’s Mightiest Inheritance” and in An American Primer. Later in his life he continues to write on the subject in his notebooks and publishes “Slang in America”.275 Words have to be “vitaliz’d” and be close to nature and to their objects in order to stand for something.276 He probably adapted this notion from Emerson’s semiotics delineated in Nature and The Poet (see chapter 2 in the present study).277 The close connection between object and representamen that is the basis of Emerson’s iconic semiotics can be found in Whitman as well. Emerson also defines language as a temporary vehicle, as 274

Nathanson argues that Whitman’s poetry is caught in the melancholy space between the magic power of words that cannot be recaptured and the merely representational function of language. One argument that indicates Whitman’s transcendentalist belief in organic language theory is his stance on naming that is very similar not only to Melville but also to Blake. See ibid., 14, 184f. In the chapter “Writing and Representation” Nathanson argues that Whitman’s poetry and his conversations with his friend Traubel suggest that he aimed at presenting rather than representing himself in writing (167f.). He rejected print as a medium because only the voice could produce the magic presence he aspired to (169). The great impasse is that he depends on the “very linguistic mechanisms from whose alienating dominance the poet should liberate us” (171). It is this tension that I call the liminal semiotics of Romanticism, which leads to the different forms of a-limitation also detectable in Whitman. 275 There are also notebooks not published in Whitman’s lifetime, Rambles Among Words, an etymological study for which Whitman worked as a ghost writer, and language theory is also treated in Democratic Vistas. The most comprehensive study of Whitman’s theory of language and its realization in Leaves of Grass is Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment. Warren discusses Whitman’s early language theories in the context of Humboldt’s, Christian C.J. Bunsen’s, and Maximilian Schele de Vere’s language theories, also focusing on linguistic aspects of comparative language studies and language as an expression of the national spirit. In chapter 2 of my study, the focus is on semiotic questions. Warren’s main thesis is that Whitman’s language theory changes from the mid-1850s to the last edition of Leaves of Grass from the idea of progress, evolution, and deferral to a more cumulative idea of language that is increasingly archaic, formal, and abstract. Warren identifies a balance of expansion and limitation in these contradictory uses of language. This idea supports my thesis of liminal Romantic semiotics and the concept of subject alimitation. I see the positive and optimistic view of language understood as a developing organism and a more critical attitude towards symbolic language introduced in “Song of the Rolling Earth” combined with the use of abstract language as the expression of the tension in Romantic semiotics. 276 Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 404. 277 See Tyler Hoffman, “Language,” A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 364. Also see Warren for an overview of language theory in connection with Whitman. Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, 8 and 112. While Emerson constructs a triadic sign of spirit, object, and symbol, Whitman’s sign is the object. Also see Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 25.

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something that is ever-changing and in flux. Whitman agrees with Emerson’s Romantic semiotics. In “Slang in America” he writes: “The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present. Or, perhaps Language is more like some vast living body, or perennial body of bodies.”278 Language is a living being that changes with time. In “America’s Mightiest Inheritance”, Whitman connects the history of mankind to the development of language. A return to the origins of language is not possible for him. New concepts require new words.279 The fluidity of the poet and the fluidity of language are intertwined in Emerson, and Whitman similarly understands human life as dynamic and language as an expression of this fluidity and rapid change. In a way, this idea also promotes arbitrary language games: the invention of new words, the formation of compounds, and the integration of loan-words. In Leaves of Grass Whitman performs the fluidity of language in several ways: he transgresses language conventions,280 he incorporates the spoken word (coming much closer to the language really spoken by men than Wordsworth);,281 he uses loan-words to create new words,282 and, most importantly, he creates a dynamic book. This is perhaps why Whitman’s major work is called Leaves of Grass. If it were leaves of paper, it would not be a presentation of unspoken meanings but only a representation in print. The different editions of Leaves of Grass change with their author, who was writing chiefly about himself (“Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man”).283 Ishmael’s schizonarration in Moby-Dick (his way of appearing in the text only to dissolve again) takes place on two different levels in Leaves of Grass. First, as demonstrated in the discussion above, the self in the text is dynamic: appearing, disappearing, becoming a large ego only to merge with people and elements in the next line.284 Secondly, the author of the text solidifies and dissolves again with each new 278

Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 408. See Whitman’s essay “America’s Mightiest Inheritance” in Walt Whitman, New York Dissected. A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass, eds. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (Folcroft: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978) 55–65, and Walt Whitman, An American Primer. With Facsimiles of the Original Manuscript, ed. Horace Traubel (Stevens Point: Holy Cow Press, 1987) 9. Also see Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, 9, and Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 12–26.Whitman’s language theory is also strongly nationalistic. In earlier editions of Leaves of Grass and in his prose works he advocates English as the most natural language fit for democracy and an expanding empire. 280 Whitman refers to the lawlessness of language in several of his texts: Rambles, Primer, and “Slang in America”. See Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, 110f. 281 See Hoffman’s discussion of slang in Hoffman, “Language,” 368–71. 282 See Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, 52f. 283 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 382. Also see “A Backward Glance”, ibid., 426. 284 Also see Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 172. Nathanson describes this as the embodiment of a poet who is at the same time elusive. By fusing body and word in performative acts, Whitman achieves this effect of fluid presence. See Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence, 1–29.

279

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edition.285 Like a body without organs, he is reassembled in a different manner, forming a new temporal being. In “So Long!” this becoming-book is described as an erotic encounter. It has nothing to do with art as a “frozen moment” (as in Keats’s “Grecian Urn” for example). On the contrary, becoming-book is dynamic and in accordance with fluid space and fluid self: “Remember my words, I may again return, / I love you, I depart from materials, / I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead”.286 A new form of language is required for this form of semiotic subject a-limitation. The Romantic subject attempts to become a sign that is more than arbitrary language. And the poet Whitman tries to save the day as many of his Romantic precursors have attempted to do. Whitman writes in “A Backward Glance”: “I consider ‘Leaves of Grass’ and its theory experimental”.287 The deadlock of arbitrariness can be avoided through the experimental character of Leaves of Grass. By transgressing language boundaries,288 the symbolic function of language is troubled and the human-sign is not caught in the semiotic web of a signifying and subjectifying regime. Authors like Charlotte Smith, William Blake, and Walt Whitman find a way of becoming-being for themselves by continually changing their work. They all deliberately inscribe themselves into their texts (Smith’s prefaces, footnotes, and references to her life; Blake’s addresses; Whitman’s bold call, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son”289), play with the authority of their voices, and engage in processes of subject a-limitation. Most radically exemplified by Blake and Whitman, the changing of the text itself (additions, erasures, editions) produces a book that does not mirror the world as the organized root-book does. Instead a rhizomatic, fluid, semiotic structure is formed. What we read are plates of metal and leaves and grass which are not yet Modernist fragments in a fragmented world, but Romantic plateaus offering a presentation of becoming-being beyond arbitrary language. From the first edition in 1855 to the so-called death-bed edition released in 1892, Leaves of Grass experienced considerable changes.290 The present study uses the most frequently cited death-bed edition because it is closest to Modernism and thus serves best to illustrate Whitman’s transitional function with regard to Romantic a-limita-

285

See Killingsworth, “Nature,” 315, and Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 75–93. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 382. 287 Ibid., 426. In other places Whitman calls Leaves a “language experiment”, Whitman, American Primer, viii. This claim is discussed in most texts on Whitman and language. See for example Wilson, Romantic Turbulence, 129–31. Or in Folsom’s chapter on Whitman and dictionaries, see Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, 12. 288 For other examples of Whitman bringing language to its limit by linking it to the body and to nature see Killingsworth, Whitman & the Earth, 45. 289 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 48. 290 For a comprehensive overview of the publishing history of Leaves see Amanda Gailey, “The Publishing History of Leaves of Grass,” A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 409–38. 286

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tion.291 Whitman released six editions each of which “contained significant changes: the addition of new poems, subtractions and revisions of old poems, shifting and recombining poems, and differing bindings and layouts”.292 Some of the poems discussed in this section, for example “Passage to India”, were not added until the 1871/72 edition, while others (such as “Song of Myself”) were merely changed. Like Blake, Whitman was involved in the production process of his books (he did not operate the printing press, but he designed the editions).293 The physical form of his book was also important to him. Both Blake and Whitman believe in the power of language in the sense of a natural sign. Both employ similar strategies of language games and language proliferation in their poems. Both try to reconcile unity with multiplicity. Both examine city space. 78 years and considerable political and epistemological changes lie between the first plates of Jerusalem and the last leaves of Leaves of Grass, but the basic mechanism of Romantic semiotics and Romantic a-limitation can be discovered in both texts. Jerusalem and Leaves are rhizomatic books (Deleuze and Guattari name Leaves as one of their examples of the American rhizome)294 that spread in different directions. Their parts can be read separately or together because ultimately they are not organized chronologically but spatially.295 Although they are not open in the sense of a Romantic fragment, they exist simultaneously as different versions of themselves and the text itself is fragmented. Their openness is also enhanced by the inclusion of the reader in the text. In the sense of Novalis’s idea of the reader as an extended author, the reader has to perform meaning-making in Jerusalem as well as in Leaves. In “A Backward Glance” Whitman writes: “I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as I have had mine.”296 I discussed similar remarks earlier: Ishmael also proclaims his inability to finish Moby-Dick and delegates the responsibility of finding the truth to the reader. One difference between the three rhizomatic books concerning reader involvement becomes immediately apparent. Blake apologizes for his text (“dear reader, forgive what you do not approve”) and Ishmael fails to produce an ordered root-book that presents the reader with a coherent and enjoyable text. Whitman, however, boldly proclaims that Leaves is 291

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is sometimes seen as a radical break with High Romanticism. See for example Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 1. I argue that it is a transitional continuation of Romantic a-limitation and not a break. Even modern and postmodern texts do not break with Romantic a-limitation, they find new limits, come closer to final limits, and comprise a spectrum that extends into the past (to texts such as Tristram Shandy) as well as the future (for example into hypertexts). 292 Gailey, “The Publishing History of Leaves of Grass,” 410. 293 Ibid., 413. 294 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. 295 On Blake see chapter 5 in this study, on Whitman see Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, 203, and Wilson, Romantic Turbulence, 118–40. 296 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 434.

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inconsistent (“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”297) and makes the reader’s effort an explicit part of his poetics. Whitman wants to write a rhizome-book. Surely Whitman’s experience of democracy, civil war, and the rapidly accelerating striation of natural space has its effects on his poetry. In the differences between Blake and Whitman the shift from Romantic to Modernist poetry becomes evident. The self has grown considerably in the nineteenth century and so have the possibilities of subject a-limitation. What Blake describes on an allegorical level for Jerusalem is depicted unmediated in Whitman: the subject becomes space and it becomes multiple. The selfreflexive element that is typical of Romantic texts reveals another difference: while Blake’s text revolves around the printing process, Whitman tries to avoid the printed letter in favor of the song and the body as illustrated in the discussion of “A Song of the Rolling Earth”. The question whether writing or the spoken word should be privileged extends into Postmodernism (Derrida’s notorious reversal) and to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that language as a symbolic and conventional system (in writing or speech) is oppressive.298

297 298

Ibid., 78. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 159.

8. Theory Plateau on Spatial A-limitation

Binary boundaries and the limit In Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht” the speaker seems to fly homewards. Why is this startling? Why does Ishmael dwell on the difference between land and sea? Why does Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet XLIV “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” have a town in the title? The answer lies in space. The lyrical I in “Mondnacht” crosses spatial boundaries that normally seem to constrain us. Ishmael is about to cross a spatial boundary of high significance to him. Finally, Smith describes an occurrence specific to a certain place (namely a churchyard in Middleton, Sussex). We are defined by space. Space is not just the air that fills the emptiness around us and the objects surrounding us. Space is not a just a container in which everything is posited. Space is something dynamic, something constructed, but also something that has always existed.1 It is “the fabric of social interaction”2 that is created by relations and constitutes relations between objects, individuals, places, and signs. This chapter provides a more comprehensive delineation of the theoretical framework behind the analysis of spatial a-limitation offered in chapter 7. Focusing mainly on Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial concepts of the book and of the smooth and the striated, I will argue that while certain spatial conceptions are useful to understand the binary aspects of a-limitation, they fail to account for the total dissolution, or the ontological questioning, of boundaries. I pick up the argument from chapter 1 (Boundaries) that Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial theory is a development of Foucault’s metaphors of space and turn to a discussion of A Thousand Plateaus. While the previous analytical chapter (chapter 7) was also concerned with the cultural, historical, and ethical notions of place, the present chapter emphasizes Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual and metaphoric constructs. Without space there could be no a-limitation. Space is a prerequisite for limits, boundaries, borders, horizons, frontiers, and thresholds. All of these terms could be 1 2

See Russell West-Pavlov, Space in Theory. Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009) 15–18. Ibid., 19.

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subsumed under the category of spatial mechanisms of division. Borders are divisions between national spaces, often visible in the form of geographic or artificially created boundaries such as mountains or barbed wire fences. Horizons are lines dividing the spaces of land and sky but also indicate the spatial boundary of our vision, and at the same time they are a promise of a space beyond our momentary perception.3 Frontiers can be geographical or national borders that are constantly pushed back. They mark off territories that are dangerous to cross into, territories that signify human limitations. All of these boundaries (I will use boundary as a neutral term) are mobile to a certain extent. The horizon moves with us, the border can be moved by us, the frontier is pushed back by us. Thresholds are a type of boundary that does not seem very mobile at first glance, they are, however, determined by cultural practices, and these, in turn, are subject to constant change.4 Limits, finally, seem to be the most uncrossable, but even they can be surpassed or eliminated in an act of a-limitation. In chapter 1 I explained the mechanism of a-limitation with the help of the notion of limits taken from Anti-Oedipus. A-limitation is a binary extended into a continuous triad because it takes the notion of the boundary and its transgression (interior limits) and adds an approximate limit (exterior limit) that functions as a regulative idea and ensures a-limitation as a becoming. Most models of spatial boundaries are binary. Boundaries can be arranged in binary oppositions of inclusion and exclusion (inside and outside), they can be figured in a scalar or gradual manner as is the case with frontiers or horizons that gradually retreat from the transgressor, or they can be arranged on a continuum of different boundaries and boundary zones.5 They can also create a third space at the intersection of two other spaces (as in two overlapping circles). The determination of boundaries can ensue from within a subject’s situation in space or from the outside. The subject can endeavour to cross scalar boundaries or bodily boundaries, but there are also mechanisms of penetration, appropriation, and imprisonment that are inflicted on the subject.6 Finally, there is a model of spatial difference that, if represented diagrammatically, resembles a hand-made quilt composed of many different scraps of cloth sewn together. Such a model attempts to capture the ongoing processes of defining the other through the self and the self through the other that create liminal existences and multiple differences. One little scrap is always defined by the distinct 3 4 5

6

On the figure of the horizon see Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts. Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990). On the threshold as liminal phenomenon see Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. (London: Routledge, 1969). Hans-Joachim Gehrke introduces a taxonomy of boundaries that focuses on cultural differences and liminal characters valid for all boundary phenomena. See Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Einleitung. Grenzgänger im Spannungsfeld von Identität und Alterität,” Grenzgänger zwischen den Kulturen, eds. Monika Fludernik and Hans-Joachim Gehrke (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 1999) 15–26. Fludernik’s diagrams illustrate different boundary phenomena in a schematic way. See Monika Fludernik, “Grenze und Grenzgänger. Topologische Etuden,” Grenzgänger zwischen den Kulturen, eds. Monika Fludernik and Hans-Joachim Gehrke (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 1999) 99–108.

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patches surrounding it. Only the last model comes close to the idea of a-limitation. Its diagrammatic representation is also the one Deleuze and Guattari use for smooth space. Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” could be interpreted with the help of a binary notion of boundaries. There is a horizon that is described as a binary opposition between earth and sky as well as a contact zone. The speaker also endows the horizon with mythological meaning, thereby linking certain connotations to a natural phenomenon (see chapters 4 and 6). The second stanza describes two different spaces: fields and woods that, if seen from above or below, have quite distinctive boundaries (tree lines, trenches, or roads). Both spaces are linked by night as the temporal space above and around them. Finally, the attention is drawn away from binary spatial constructions in landscape to a model of surrounding space. The subject’s soul tries to overcome the bodily boundaries that separate it from natural space as well as from a third space, the home, which is not actually present but is set as the goal of the journey. The home could then be perceived as a gradual boundary, a space which, in its potentiality, shares the qualities of the limit or of the horizon. The subject’s soul flies through the night as if it were flying home. The subjunctive mode is as significant to spatial a-limitation as it is to semiotic and subject a-limitation (see previous theory chapters). The horizon and the home as potentially unreachable spaces/boundaries are both expressed in the subjunctive (“Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel [my emphasis]” and “Als flöge sie nach Haus [my emphasis]”).7 Fields and woods as easily accessible spaces are presented in the indicative mode because they do not belong to mythical or transcendent space. In the spatial arrangement of the stanzas, they form the solid core space surrounded by flighty, mystic, and possible spaces. The mere description of the poem’s spatial arrangement shows that its ostensible simplicity only serves to conceal a complex interaction of sign, subject, and space. It could even be argued that the major category at work in this poem is not what Foucault understood to be the paradigm of the nineteenth century, time, but rather the most significant perceptual category of our age, space. That is why Foucault was concerned with spaces and liminality. The limit as one type of boundary finds its expression in different modes. Subjects can approach limits in an attempt to transgress these; they may be limited by their own body boundaries, attributes, and abilities, and they may only endure transgression up to a certain limit. I explained the neologism a-limitation with regard to its ambiguous prefix ‘a’ in chapter 1. I chose the second part of the morpheme, the idea of ‘limit’, because of its strong implications of constraint (the exterior limit). The notion of limit is also linked to the point of departure of my theoretical construct: transgression. Limit is a central category in Foucault’s writing in general.8 According to Foucault, the history 7 8

Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Hartwig Schultz (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006) 322f. For more details on Foucault and limits see Daniel Defert, “Foucault. Explorer of the Limitless Reign of the Limits,” Challenging the Boundaries, eds. Isil Bas and Donald C. Freeman (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007) 55–68.

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of culture is one of limits with a particular emphasis on liminal phenomena such as madness, sexuality, and literature. His concern is with those modes of existence that are situated outside or at the limit of conventional existence.

Transgression and heterotopia The spatial concept of the limit is linked to that of transgression, which is an important element for understanding the basis of a-limitation. In “Preface to Transgression” Foucault writes: “The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.”9 Foucault describes the limit as a particularly resistant type of boundary. Boundaries, however, can be crossed. There is also a violent aspect to the act of transgression that is not inherent in all boundary phenomena as only transgression carries the limit to its limits. With its endless crossing and piercing of boundaries, Foucault portrays transgression as a “flash of lightning” that, by illuminating the night, reveals its darkness.10 A focus on the spatial implications shows that transgression is defined by a limit in space that can be transgressed, but that it is simultaneously governed by an obstinacy leading to an endless chain of transgressions and new limits, new voids, and empty spaces. The same mechanisms determine a-limitation. An idea of boundary is required in order to cross or eliminate it. The boundary functions as a constraint on the subject in space. If the boundary were effortlessly crossed, the act of crossing would be devoid of any significance. At the same time, the boundary resists being crossed by closing behind the crossing subject, by appearing at a different location in space, or by infinitely regressing before the subject so that it can never be reached. Foucault’s concept of transgression goes beyond the strict taxonomies described above because dyads and binaries do not entirely suffice to describe movements in space. The idea of a gradual patchwork space or a space of differences is probably closest to transgression because it entails the infinite multiplication of interrelated patches. Foucault’s preoccupation with space in his writings probably arises from the assumption he articulates in “Different Spaces”, a talk he delivered to the Architectural Studies Circle in 1967: “The present age may be the age of space instead. We are in an era of

9

10

Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” trans. Robert Hurley, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998) 73. See ibid., 74.

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the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered.”11 The spatial concept presented in this talk is worth considering because it also operates with a notion of space that eschews binaries. After briefly describing the historical changes in spatial conceptions, Foucault turns his attention to a particular kind of space that has always existed in all cultures: the heterotopia.12 These so-called heterotopias used to be crisis heterotopias, “sacred or forbidden places reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis with respect to society and the human milieu in which they live.”13 These places, to which menstruating women or pubescent boys were banned, have disappeared in favour of heterotopias of deviation, “in which individuals are put whose behavior is deviant with respect to the mean or the required norm”.14 This change from the heterotopias of primitive societies to those including some of Foucault’s favourite places (such as psychiatric wards, hospitals, and prisons) is the first of six principles he uses to describe heterotopias. The spatial construction of heterotopias is significant. Heterotopias (for example cemeteries) are located outside normal spaces, but they are connected to them through their function in society. The heterotopian space is subdivided by bringing together different places in one space (as the theatre does on stage) and different times. The important question concerns the nature of the boundary between normative space and heterotopias: “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that isolates them and makes them penetrable at the same time. In general, one does not gain entry to a heterotopian emplacement as if to a windmill. Either one is constrained to enter […] or one has to submit to rituals and purifications.”15 Sometimes it seems as if one could enter easily, but this is just an illusion. Entrance precipitates exclusion. Foucault’s notion of the boundary between normal space and heterotopias coincides with his idea of the limit. Boundaries can be transgressed, but not in an afternoon stroll. Transgressing a boundary or entering a heterotopia could just be an illusion. Several Romantic texts make use of the figure of the illusionary boundary (rendering genuine transgression impossible) and the illusionary crossing or the crossing into illusions. One only has to consider the frequently applied device of the fantastic dream or the work of art in the text in many of Keats’s and Eichendorff’s poems or in Novalis’s Ofterdingen. There are certain constraints on limits and heterotopias that contribute to the desire to surpass or enter them. The notion of the boundary is, as suggested in Foucault’s 11

12 13 14 15

Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” trans. Robert Hurley, Essential Works of Foucault 1954– 1984. Vol. 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. ed. James Faubion, 8 ed. (New York: New Press, 1998) 175. As opposed to utopias that are merely imaginative places, heterotopias are real to a certain extent. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 179. Note that many of the examples Foucault names for crisis heterotopias strangely correspond with Turner’s concepts of liminal personae. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 183.

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“Preface”, one that resists absolute boundaries by being penetrable. Furthermore, a heterotopia is not the binary opposition to place or space (that would be utopia), but a place that is simultaneously connected to and excluded from the norm. In a way, literature is a heterotopia. It deviates from society, but fulfils a function in it. It juxtaposes desperate things and times, and it is not always easy to enter into. This means that the relation between a heterotopia and normative space is not strictly binary: there is neither a strict separation or opposition, nor is there a mimetic relation. Therefore, the literary heterotopia bears characteristics of the rhizome-book. Once entered into, literature is full of heterotopias.16 The growing body of critical writings on spatial narratology and on spatial constructions of subjectivity demonstrates the importance of spatial boundaries in literature.17 Most of these models, however, depend on the binary construction of space. Foucault’s notion of transgression and his heterotopias, on the other hand, show that space is neither a container nor is it segmented into binaries by boundaries.

Rhizomes Deleuze and Guattari wrote two books in reaction to binary models of meaning-making in linguistics, psychoanalysis, and structuralism: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The title of the second book explicitly invokes spatial concepts, but AntiOedipus also operates with spatial metaphors and spatial modes of thinking (on the idea of the limit in Anti-Oedipus see chapter 1). Deleuze and Guattari’s entire way of thinking “evinces strong spatial (rather than linear or hierarchical) characteristics from the outset”.18 Their vocabulary is derived from the semantic field of space: territorialization, line of flight, zone of intensity, mapping, etc. While their critique of the Freudian and Lacanian notion of lack is of some interest as it eschews binary modes of thinking in favor of the idea of plenitudes and connections, I will focus on their arguments re16 17

18

On the connection between spatial and discursive limits in heterotopias see West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 6. Lotman contends that poetics depends on the transgression of spatial boundaries by a hero (also see chapter 1). See Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). Ronen develops a spatial taxonomy that includes the relevance of possible spaces for characters. See Ruth Ronen, “Space in Fiction,” Poetics Today 7.3 (1986): 421–38. Natascha Würzbach draws on Lotman and Gerhard Hoffmann’s phenomenological approach to demonstrate how the literary subject’s experience of space is relevant for its characterization. See Natascha Würzbach, “Erzählter Raum. Fiktionaler Baustein, kultureller Sinnträger, Ausdruck der Geschlechterordnung,” Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörg Helbig (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2001) 105–30. Dennerlein returns to a container version of space to develop a narratology of space. See Katrin Dennerlein, Narratologie des Raumes (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009). West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 117.

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lating explicitly to space. First, I will explain the rhizome-book in detail because it is a Romantic way of writing (see chapters 3 and 7), and second, I will delineate the notion of smooth and striated space employed in chapter 7. In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari accomplish two things at the same time. On the one hand, they mention almost all the relevant terms of their analytical model (such as map, territory, rhizome) letting the reader marvel at what they could possibly mean. On the other hand, they provide a model analysis by discussing their own book, whose properties are endemic to all their concepts. The meaning of the terms and the argumentative structure become apparent in the following chapters, or plateaus as they prefer to call them. Their book is not defined by chronology (all chapters bear a date in their title, but they are not organized chronologically), but by space. Theoretically, it can be entered at virtually any point. Its organization into plateaus is derived from George Bateson’s study of Balinese culture and refers to different ways of experiencing sexual pleasure.19 In the introduction, Deleuze and Guattari define a plateau as: “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end”.20 The important notion here is that space (as represented by plateaus) does not presuppose an origin, a centre, or an in-built end-point. This means that a book written in plateaus structurally resembles the rhizome. Though the notion of the rhizome provides an interesting theory (and a poetics), A Thousand Plateaus does not fully realize this theory. It cannot be entered at any point and some chronological reading is necessary in order to understand the involvement of the different concepts. The present study is, of course, not a rhizome-book either. Its genre (academic writing) and its medium function as the boundaries of the rhizome and turn it into a root-book. Deleuze and Guattari defy the genre (while this study remains well within its boundaries), but the medium still restricts them. If they had written the book in the past decade, it would probably have been a hypertext publication because the rhizome describes what we now know as hypertext (see chapter 9).21 The rhizome is described in opposition to arborescent structures which represent organized, Western modes of thought and which are directed by ideas of hierarchy (most prominently in the State apparatus), origins, and centres.22 Grammatical trees illustrate this choice of the tree or root-tree for the depiction of organized thought (and space). The rhizome vitiates hierarchically arranged, linear conceptions of order. It is not at all the root below the tree. Rather, it could be imagined as a bulb or a tuber, or a part of a root that has been discarded and is now wildly growing back. 19 20 21 22

See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 175. Ibid., 24. For a brief introduction that also lists the most important literature on the rhizome as metaphor for hypertexts see Alice van der Klei, “Repeating the Rhizome,” SubStance 31.1 (2002): 48–55. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5–23.

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By examining the rhizome more closely, I will delineate the new mode of thinking that Deleuze and Guattari seek to achieve with their critique of the arborescent concept of psychoanalysis. They list six distinct characteristics of the rhizome.23 First of all, a rhizome is defined by connections (1): anything can be connected to anything without fixing on a particular order. The result of such a way of connecting is (2) a heterogeneous assemblage that does justice to a world of multiplicity rather than to an artificially created order. Their example for this is well chosen: there is no mother tongue in language. Instead, language develops around power structures. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that language is not a matter of origin, but rather a dynamic process influenced by various factors (power, identity, class, education, mobility, etc.) that occurs when different groups or individuals communicate. The principle of multiplicity (3) directly follows from this assumption. A multiplicity is organized through planes of consistency. What are these planes or zones? A rhizome is organized in lines rather than points. When these lines intersect, higher energies are produced and multiplicities are created. A new language variety that comes into being when different cultures come into contact (through trade, colonization, or globalization) could also be understood as a multiplicity of new speakers. A multiplicity is always something that eschews definition by being uncountable. Uncountability (6) is consequently also one of the six principles that are inter-connected in rhizome-like fashion (they overlap but don’t signify in the same manner). Something that is uncountable escapes control and structure. This notion is tied to the idea of the signifying rupture (4), which is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s thorough jettisoning of the dualisms underpinning traditional Western thought. The rhizome can be ruptured, broken, and interrupted, but it grows back. This rupture can take place as the inclusion of root-tree elements in the rhizome. For this reason, the rhizome has stratified, territorialized, organized, signified parts, but also lines of deterritorialization which it constantly flies down. This means that processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization are always connected and caught up in one another. If two elements are drawn to one another and connect with one another, a territory (a similar mechanism is at work in all processes, be it intensity or consistency) is created. This territory is still characterized by lines and open boundaries so that it can deterritorialize in order to make way for new connections. And again, new connections are formed (naturally or artificially by systems trying to compensate for the destructive deterritorialization of capitalism) through reterritorialization.24 Finally, the cartography of a rhizome is that of the map (5) that is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification…”.25 The map as topography is opposed to the mechanism of tracing be23 24 25

See ibid., 8–23. On the concepts of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization see West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 171–89. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 13.

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cause it has multiple entry-ways, while tracing seems to suggest a teleological order. Of course, the binary opposition does not apply in this case: maps and tracing go together because a map is used for tracing and tracing eventually organizes the map, while the map offers a decentralized space. Interestingly, individuals function in a similar way: they only come into being in the moment of connection and then become interchangeable (map, rhizome, line of flight) until they connect again (zone, territory, consistency). Romantic traits of subject a-limitation are reflected in this concept. The Romantic individual strives to connect to others (as in a plane of consistency) in order to think creatively and to surpass human constraints. This is why the Romantic subject dissolves (deterritorializes) at the moment of its evolution. This principle dismantles the proposition that individuals can exist independently of everything else. There is a constant flow (another term encountered in Deleuze and Guattari) that renders subjects regions of intensity partly marked off from their environment by blurred borders.26 If we recall the initial models of the subject as an entity separated from the surrounding space by its corporeal border, the difference becomes apparent. Disjunctive spaces (space), binary oppositions (language), and stable subjects (subjectivity) are only auxiliary constructions for Romantics, just as they are for Deleuze and Guattari. The construction of apparently binary oppositions (rhizome versus tree-root) is the first step in Deleuze and Guattari’s argument. The second step is the dissolution of these oppositions into mutual inclusion, merging, and processes of transformation through synthesis. This idea of duality and continuity as two interrelated concepts of perceiving the world, space, and boundaries is particularly central to the concept of a-limitation. Boundaries, divisions, organized structures and the transgression, transcendence, and dissolution of these boundaries are coeval. Their relation of reciprocal influence leads to the a-limitation and successive constitution of boundaries in the same way territories are formed, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized. As a result, one could argue that mechanisms of enclosure and the establishment of boundaries are a part of a-limitation.

The smooth and the striated Considering the plateau in Deleuze and Guattari’s book which focuses most explicitly on space provides a basis for understanding the triadic mechanism of a-limitation. All of their plateaus are preceded by a picture. The chapter “1440: The Smooth and the Striated” begins with the picture of a patchwork quilt composed of many different scraps of cloth in all kinds of shapes and patterns. This is a diagrammatical depiction portraying a-limitation most accurately in its openness and its ambiguous conception of subjectivity and semiotics. 26

See West-Pavlov, Space in Theory, 174–78.

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Deleuze and Guattari choose the quilt as the frontispiece for their chapter on smooth and striated space because material is one of the metaphors they utilize to explain their spatial concept. Quilt and felt are materials resembling smooth space, while fabrics resemble striated space. Through the process of weaving, fabric is defined by horizontal and vertical relations. Weavers use fixed threads and a shuttle to produce fabric. This leads to the following observation: “a striated space of this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on at least one side: the fabric can be infinite in length but not in width…[my emphasis]”.27 Striated space is delimited in the sense that its boundaries are marked; it is organized into a top and a bottom, a left and a right and cannot be surpassed. Binaries no longer determine meaning as they do in structuralist systems. Consequently, the binary between text and world is also questioned. For Deleuze and Guattari, the book has nothing to do with signification, nor does it mirror the world: “[C]ontrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world”.28 World and book are not in a mimetic relationship, but in one of reciprocal influence. The material metaphor that best represents smooth or rhizomatic space is felt. Felt has a different structure from fabric. There is no separation of threads; it is not homogeneous, but “in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation [my emphasis]”.29 These quotations explicitly evoke the opposition between the “delimited” and the “unlimited”. This opposition is supported by various examples from different areas. Smooth space is connected to nomads, lines, machines, non-metric music, certain kinds of arts, nonEuclidian mathematics, infinity, and to bodies without organs. Striated space is associated with hierarchy and settlement, the State apparatus, points, numbers, metric systems, rectangular shapes, Euclidian mathematics, finite, closed areas and organization. One model is of particular interest: the Maritime Model. I discussed the sea in conjunction with a-limitation in the previous chapter. Romanticism provides a sublime scenery of contemplation, but this scenery also bears connotations of terror and transgression. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the sea or the ocean can be understood as the smooth space par excellence.30 Smooth space is defined by lines, trajectories, direc-

27

28 29 30

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 524. The French original reads “délimité”. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Le Èditions de Minuit, 1980) 593. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12. Ibid., 525. French original: “ouvert ou illimité dans toutes les directions”, Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, 594. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 528–32, 29.

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tions. It is filled with events or haecceities31 and affects (as opposed to properties), it is perceived by the “haptic” (as opposed to “optic”), it is governed by forces (as opposed to organizing forms), it is described as intensive (as opposed to extensive), and it resembles a body without organs (as opposed to organisms). It is occupied by intensities, wind, noise, forces, sonorous and tactile qualities. While striated space is dominated by the eye that uses the the sky as measurement and consequently perceives the horizon as its boundary, navigation on smooth space works with systems based on wind and noise and colors. Of course, this analogy coincides with the imaginary construction of a nomadic culture that uses felt, creates art without strict lines and limits, and travels in a different mode. An aesthetics of smooth space privileges the line “that delimits nothing […] that is constantly changing direction, a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation – such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space.”32 Such a line cannot be a separating horizon. The nineteenth century is, however, as the analysis of Eichendorff’s Taugenichts, Smith’s sea poems, and Whitman’s American landscapes shows (see chapter 7), characterized by the exploitation of natural resources through the striation of space. The same is true for whaling. Whaling depends on the tracing of the whales’ routes on charts and maps. It depends on precise navigation, on measurement, and on planning. Furthermore, it is part of a growing economy and the exploitation of nature. Striation and territorialization of the sea as space (and whaling) started much earlier than the nineteenth century. Deleuze and Guattari mark the turning point of the ocean’s striation as early as the year 1440. With expeditions and new navigational systems, with longitudes and latitudes (again, dividing lines that segment space and make it measurable), the striation of the sea was carried into other formerly smooth spaces. In their introduction, Deleuze and Guattari name the American West with its Indian territories and works such as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as exceptions. Again, their notion of Native American life is as idealized as their fictional nomadology, but one can easily understand why the Native American mode of movement is attractive for conceptions of smooth space. Travelling according to season and following packs of animals, using their hides to merge with them – these are strong metaphors for smooth space. The expansion towards the Western frontier could be perceived as striation. The railway, the drawing of State lines, and the building of settlements all organize space into fixed points of orientation. By analyzing Whitman’s concept of the prairie and earlier American notions of nature (Emerson), I showed in chapter 7 that there is a constant oscillation between smooth and striated space in American literary discourse. 31 32

“Haecceity” is Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the subject that is only defined by spatio-temporal coordinates and by connecting with others on planes of consistency. See ibid., 289f. Ibid., 549.

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According to Deleuze and Guattari, the sea, though having been striated, remains a kind of smooth space. As in the rhizome that grows back, deterritorialization as the power of smooth space counteracts striation. If the city functions as the opposite of the sea and as the striated space par excellence, its presence reimparts the smooth space of the sea. The city (as allocated space that accelerates agriculture) exists next to the peasants’ participation in “nondelimited” space.33 Through their opposition, the dynamics of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization are put into motion. The Romantics already felt the beginnings of modern life. British Romantics, in particular, deal with the city as a striated space that confines human life to misery. The poems of William Blake and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, for example, describe London as a place of poverty and organized child labor. Other Romantics do not treat striated space in their artistic works, but turn to smooth space instead. The escape into nature, or what would be perceived as smooth space, is a consequence of this early urbanization and industrialization – or striation. Art as the smooth space of deterritorialization has to assume rhizomatic forms in order to fulfil its function. These rhizomatic forms and their tendency to turn into root structures (and vice versa) are expressed by what I call semiotic a-limitation. The transgression, transcendence, and dissolution of boundaries are ways of creating smooth spaces within the striated, a process that does not require major changes as Deleuze and Guattari point out. Sometimes a change of movement and speed suffices. Michel de Certeau’s thoughts on the different modes of exploring the city illustrate this. One mode is the perception of the city from above: a synoptic view that enables us to orient ourselves. The other mode is aimlessly wandering the streets.34 Deleuze and Guattari would call this walking down lines of flight that deterritorialize the city. Such an experience mirrors smooth space and creates a feeling of unlimited space in contrast to the perception of horizons, boundaries, and limits from the top of a tower. I have already pointed out that Deleuze and Guattari use the limit as an explanatory category for spatial concepts in combination with various prefixes: “unlimited”, “delimited”, “non-delimited”. I would like to argue that ‘a-limited’ is the most accurate term as it encompasses all the processes of smooth space: striation and reimparting; territorialization, deterritorialization, reterritorialization (which operates from a different starting point); the formation of intensities, their dissolution, and their re-formation. Following the argumentative strategy of Deleuze and Guattari, I have started this chapter with the brief invocation of dualisms that fail to precisely relate the boundary phenomena in Romanticism. Foucault’s claim that transgressions and boundaries depend on each other in a way that cannot be described by dialectics is, in my opinion, rephrased by Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the triadic processes that connect binaries without entirely negating their necessity. Nowhere does the principle of difference and distinc33 34

Ibid., 531. Michel de Certeau, Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) 91–111.

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tion as a non-hierarchal concept (as in Derrida) with a tendency towards infinite progression and dynamics manifest itself as conspicuously as it does in the idea of the continuous triad invoked by Romantic thought as well as by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of space. In the discussion of “Mondnacht”, I proposed a triad of subject-a-limitation (see chapter 6): from myth to nature to the subject and back. Complementing this analysis, I have considered space in “Mondnacht” from the perspective of binary spaces and boundaries in this chapter. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the smooth and striated, I will re-evaluate this analysis. In the first stanza, the reader witnesses the (imaginary) encounter between sky (or heaven) and the earth. Instead of perceiving them as top and bottom or as transgressive elements (in an act of procreation that brings about the titans) they can also be understood as scenery, as smooth space. The horizon is not perceived as a dividing line, but rather as an enabling absolute or all-encompassing element that can also form smooth space. The zone of intensity that is created in this encounter persists throughout the sexualized imagery in the second stanza. It is the start of a formation or striation. While the element of air and the night in the second stanza seem to invoke associations of smooth space, the differentiation into fields and woods coincides with the differentiation of the subject from nature. Both spaces are present, but there is always a tendency towards either smoothness (first stanza) or striation (second stanza). It is worth noting that the second stanza of striated space and further subject formation is the only one completely written in the indicative mode. In the final stanza the subject, which by naming itself has become an individual, disintegrates. It becomes something else. The homeward-bound soul literally goes off on a line of flight. Space becomes smooth again as the striations are erased by the subject’s mode of becoming. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, a change in speed or movement or direction can create smooth space. The subject is not described by a speaker. Instead the mood of the poem constructs the fictional subject’s identity. The poem, in its leaning towards smooth space, constructs its speaker as a haecceity in the mode of becomingbeing. A Thousand Plateaus similarly operates with becoming and becoming-being as key concepts. Becoming is neither progress nor regress because it constitutes an in-betweenthings. Deleuze and Guattari invent the term “involution” for this process.35 If Romantic concepts are defined by progressive Universalpoesie as something that is im Werden, not as progress in the shape of a definite goal but with Romantic irony in mind as something that is forever changing, Romanticism comes very close to the idea of becoming-being. Consequently, it is not surprising to discover that the examples of becoming are in fact taken from Romantic literature. 35

See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 263.

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Deleuze and Guattari use Moby-Dick as a primary literary example: “Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale…”.36 How does Ahab achieve this becoming-whale?37 According to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal has to involve a pack as well as an exceptional individual animal with which an alliance must be formed. Deleuze and Guattari probably choose the notion of the pack because of its compatibility with the multitude. There are examples of becoming-animal that do not involve multiplicities. Leaving aside this particular detail of their theory, let us turn to Ahab. Moby Dick is an anomalous animal, a phenomenon of bordering: “he is a borderline”.38 Ahab can form an alliance with this border-line because the border-line is a merging zone, or a line of flight, or a deterritorialization. At the root of this concept lies the notion of an amorphous subject which I have already mentioned in the discussion of the “Introduction”. Deleuze and Guattari define the self as follows: If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes.39

Peripheral or liminal existence functions as a catalyst for change (or becoming). Ahab’s becoming-whale, his excursion into border zones, his a-limitation, carries him “[i]nto the void…”.40 One could also say that his becoming-whale is completed by first having his leg and then his entire body internalized by the border-line creature thus forming a new zone of intensity.41 A zone of intensity is one way of defining the individual. Deleuze also calls it a haecceity. When an individual/haecceity enters into composition with other intensities, a new individual is formed. That is why German Romantics embraced the idea of creating something together. The potential for creativity resides in the connection with others (see chapter 6). One of A Thousand Plateaus’s sections on the plateau of becoming has the heading: “Memories of a Sorcerer”. This sorcerer is none other than the writer because writing is a becoming. While Deleuze and Guattari do not dwell on this notion, it is worth mentioning because Romantic writing is about becoming. Obvious examples are instances of metalepsis, where the author writes himself into the story to become story (see chap36 37 38 39 40 41

Ibid., 268. On Ahab’s semiotic way of becoming-whale see chapter 3. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 270. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 275. On the destructive force of smooth space in Ahab’s case see Tamsin Lorraine, “Ahab and Becoming-Whale. The Nomadic Subject in Smooth Space,” Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Greg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) 159–75.

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ter 3). I will draw on Smith’s poem “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” (extensively discussed in chapter 7) to illustrate this. A speaker describes the sea as a space of wind and waves. The sea deterritorializes the land when it transgresses onto the beach to wash out the graveyard. In the final couplet, the speaker expresses her desire for becoming-sea and becoming-corpse in strong terms: “While I am doom’d – by life’s long storm opprest, / To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest”. The writing of this poem, whose title explicitly points to the process of writing, turns the speaker into a sorcerer who can connect with the dead and the sea for a brief moment even if his or her speaking self remains outside the smooth space of the sea. Because the speaker is bound (“opprest”) to land, life, and striated perception (gazing instead of feeling), she envies the dead. However, through becoming-being (writing oneself into smooth space), the speaker avoids total deterritorialization (death). Despite the fact that she does not die, the writer engages in a-limitation, i.e. in smooth space and transgressive desires. In the end, however, though Romantics strive to create smooth spaces in the striated world, the triadic process always keeps them from achieving a final stage of smoothness. Striation is, as I show in chapter 7, part of the nineteenth-century world that inspires the first ecological movements. Smooth and striated are not mutually exclusive as they cross over into each other. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s other binaries (molar-molecular, rhizome-root) they are not exclusive – or, as Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries is no progression”.42 Distinction in order to overcome binaries is part of both Deleuze and Guattari’s and Blake’s philosophies. No wonder all of them write rhizomatic books.

42

William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988) 34.

9. In Place of a Conclusion

Fragmented and convulsive: Whitman, Deleuze, and the limit Abandoning symbolic language (turning to the diagrammatic), engaging in absolute deterritorialization, becoming-woman (and -animal and -imperceptible) or becoming a body without organs, and writing a rhizome-book are all strategies aimed at the same goal in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: reaching the limit. They use examples from literature to demonstrate these movements. In A Thousand Plateaus it is Ahab’s encounter with the exceptional animal from the pack that facilitates his own becoming-animal. Proust is a valuable informant in Anti-Oedipus who demonstrates how desiring machines work and he is also discussed in another study. Miller, Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Beckett, and Joyce are recurring figures. Lovecraft, Woolf, and Shakespeare also make appearances. One essay deals with Melville’s narrative “Bartleby the Scrivener” and an entire book is devoted to Kafka. Among these literary references Walt Whitman is of particular interest for this study because he writes a rhizome-book – though its segments are leaves rather than plateaus. I would like to bring Deleuze and Whitman together by looking at Deleuze’s short essay on Whitman that was published in Essays Critical and Clinical,1 and then use Whitman as a point of departure for a short exploration into Modernist and Postmodernist a-limitation. 1

As far as I can tell, the combination Whitman-Deleuze is, despite Deleuze’s discussion of Whitman, a rare one. Angus Fletcher discusses Whitman in conjunction with Deleuze, but he does not mention “Whitman” in Essays Critical and Clinical or Capitalism and Schizophrenia. See Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry. Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) 130–31. He also works with the terms ‘becoming’ and ‘being’, but does not explicitly connect them to the Deleuzian concept. Eric Wilson uses the concept of nomadology as a way of thinking. He draws on A Thousand Plateaus and “Nomadic Thought” to define Leaves as a rhizome-book and to illustrate that ecosystems always have rhizomatic qualities. His chief focus is on Whitman’s Platonism and atomic theory. Wilson mentions similar key terms to those I use (multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity, becoming), but his approach differs considerably. He focuses mainly on the rhizomatic characteristics of single poems. See Eric Wilson, Romantic Turbulence. Chaos, Ecology, and American Space (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 118–40.

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Whitman’s appeal to Deleuze and Guattari is apparent. The spaces in Leaves are smooth and deterritorializing on a metaphorical level (the textual space or spatial movement as a metaphor for subject boundary crossing). The subjects are multiplicities that connect to each other in various ways (atoms temporarily assemble into a body).2 Semiotically, Whitman makes first attempts at dispensing with symbolic language. Whitman is aware of the transgressive potential of his work – not only of the effects his explicit depiction of sexual intercourse has, but also of its linguistically and philosophically innovative potential. He sees the reason for the purported modernity of Leaves in its engagement with space, more precisely in the fact that it was written in the United States of America. In “A Backward Glance” he writes: I should say, indeed, it were useless to attempt reading the book without first carefully tallying that preparatory background and quality in the mind. Think of the United States to-day […] these incalculable, modern, American, seething multitudes around us, of which we are inseparable parts! Think, in comparison, of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past or present Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multitudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the democratic masses never was.3

Whitman’s nationalism (occasionally approaching imperialism) is also expressed in his poetry where he praises America, its presidents, and institutions, but most of all, its people. The passage demonstrates that America stands for the idea of the absolute limit and its transgression. Geographically and politically, Europe is a bounded country and therefore less likely to produce poetry that breaks limits. The breaking of limits is one central theme in Leaves of Grass. In “Song of the Open Road”, Whitman writes: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines”.4 In “Darest Thou Now O Soul”, death is the ultimate limit: “Till when the ties loosen, / All but the ties eternal, Time and Space, / Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us”.5 The figura etymologica at the end of the line and sentence adds further weight to the dissolution of boundaries, which the speaker strives towards or has already achieved in “Assurances”: “I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless, in vain I try to think how limitless”. 6 Time, space, and the subject are limitless in Whitman. The only limit is that of the comprehension of this limitlessness. The transgression of this limit, to think the unthinkable, is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s goals, but they disagree with Whitman on its prerequisite. In A Thousand Plateaus, they define the American West as rhizomatic (with an “ever-receding limit” and 2 3 4 5 6

See Wilson, Romantic Turbulence, 123. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 429. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 342.

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“shifting and displaced frontier”).7 In Deleuze’s essay on Whitman in Essays Critical and Clinical, however, this notion of America as a rhizome (a metaphor that can be employed for signs, subjects, and spaces) is qualified. America is not necessary for the breaking of limits: “With much confidence and tranquility, Whitman states that writing is fragmentary, and that the American writer has to devote himself to writing in fragments. This is precisely what disturbs us – assigning this task to America, as if Europe had not progressed along the same path.”8 Deleuze states that Europe is as capable of producing fragmented literature as America is. The only difference is that Europeans have an innate sense of totality and have to acquire the sense for fragmentation, while it is the other way around with Americans. Deleuze is fascinated by the spontaneity of the fragment in Whitman’s assessment of American literature.9 The present study shows that the semiotics of German and English Romanticism are a basis for the transgression, transcendence, and dissolution of boundaries that also finds its literary expression in fragmented forms. Deleuze considers Whitman an exceptional poet because he redefines the relation of the part to the whole in favor of the part. Whitman privileges the whole over the fragment only when he relapses into Hegelian modes of thinking. The fragment comes first and the encompassing totality is left intact.10 In Leaves of Grass the relation between multiplicity and unity is strongly associated with the American idea of in pluribus unum. The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ make America great: “Underneath all, individuals, / I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals, / The American compact is altogether with individuals, / The only government is that which makes minute of individuals, / The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual – namely to You” (“By the Blue Ontario’s

7 8 9

10

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 5th ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 21. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 56. See ibid., 56. In the first section of Specimen Days Whitman writes: “May-be, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.” Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1892) 9. See Deleuze, Essays, 58. Whitman’s term “ensemble-Individuality” from Democratic Vistas might also appeal to Deleuze. Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 232. Warren looks at the negotiation between the one and the many in terms of language and identifies three movements in Whitman’s “Starting from the Paumanok”. For example, the first line focuses on the many, the second on the individual, and the third on the resolution of the contradiction between the two. James Perrin Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) 125. This is not only a typical Romantic triad that ends in synthesis, but also a movement of a-limitation. The relation between the one and the individual is a concern in many of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts as they try to leave Platonism behind. See for example Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs. The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 94– 109. With reference to Proust and Signs, Fletcher explains that according to Deleuze the one is an end or ideal, a final boundary in Proust, see Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 131.

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Shore”).11 Interestingly, Blake (see chapters 5 and 7) and Whitman both focus on the minute particulars or minute individuals and both de-subjectify their literary subjects by reducing them to types, myths, topoi, and occupational descriptions. If the subject’s boundaries are already open, it is easier to form new relations and constellations and integrate it into a whole. Whitman explicitly proclaims the open subject: “I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully arm’d”.12 In Blake, unity in God preserves the alleged particularity of the subject and in Whitman the nation preserves individuality. Whitman’s nation looks like a patchwork quilt made of heterogeneous relative selves and threatened by war.13 War is important in this context because it is a liminal phenomenon. In A Thousand Plateaus the war machine is a force of deterritorialization. Romantic literature addresses the Napoleonic Wars, but in Whitman’s writings war becomes a means of connections and disruptions when men are just fragmented body parts in a hospital.14 Modernist fictions of war take this description of partial objects even further in their accounts of body parts and excrements. Thus space (America with its geographical and political prerequisites) influences the concept of the self, which in turn is reflected in writing. Deleuze names asyntactic infinite sentences as a semiotic example of this fragmented way of writing. In breaks and ruptures, in what Whitman calls “convulsiveness”, sentences spread in all directions, turn around, spin, and proceed down a line of flight.15 The relation between fragmentation and totality is only acceptable to Deleuze because it is based on the a priori fluidity of the parts. According to Deleuze, this fluidity enables relations between diverse aspects. This praising of the principle of open relations is in accordance with the theory put forward by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The diversity principle is that of desiring machines that are only functional connections between partial objects. The machines run on the premise that parts connect and disconnect only to reconnect again, exemplifying the convulsive operating mode.16 In A Thousand Plateaus the residual effect of this infinite process, the subject, is called a haecceity, a momentary assemblage into something resembling a subject. This entails a loosening of conventional sexuality defined by Oedipal 11 12 13 14 15

16

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 273. Ibid., 381. See Deleuze, Essays, 57. See ibid., 59. Whitman writes a very short section on “Convulsiveness” in Specimen Days in which he connects writing to war and movement of his time: “As I have look’d over the proof-sheets of the preceding pages, I have once or twice fear’d that my diary would prove, at best, but a batch of convulsively written reminiscences. Well, be it so. They are but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times. The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness.” Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 79. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) 38.

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relations (mother-father-child) and heterosexual reproduction that ensures the continuation of the Oedipal constellation. It is this redefinition of sexual relationships that Deleuze refers to. Whitman’s concept of nature is inseparable from the relationship between heterogeneous beings “(the bee and the flower)”.17 The bee and the flower exemplify “nonhuman sex” in AntiOedipus, the ultimate aim of the desiring machine. In practice this simply means the inclusion of less conventional erogenous zones and various gender combinations in sexual encounters.18 In this instance Whitman is as good an example as Proust or Miller (used by Deleuze and Guattari) because he explicitly celebrates sex in various combinations. The sexual encounter between the self and the ocean, the book-self and a man, or the self that has assumed the body of a woman to sleep with a man, are just a few examples discussed above. Becoming-woman and becoming-animal (“I think I could turn and live with animals”)19 or becoming-element are further instances of these combinations.20 In the spirit of Romantic becoming-woman combined with a modern idea of full equality Whitman writes: “Unfolded only out of the inimitable poems of woman can come the poems of man, (only thence have my poems come)”.21 Whitman was known for his progressive views on gender relations and his explicit descriptions of intercourse between men and women and he has since become notorious for his celebration of homosexual love. Unsurprisingly, Deleuze also refers to Whitman’s idea of Camaraderie, the love and friendship between men, to illustrate his point. There is no notion of lack in Whitman’s rendition of sexuality; everyone is perfect and unites with another perfect being. Deleuze connects nonhuman sex with nature as process rather than as form. Two things are important here: process and relation. Both describe a ‘how’ or a function rather than a ‘what’ or a meaning. They originate in the idea of the desiring machine as an alternative to Oedipal oppression and lack in Anti-Oedipus and are further developed into a semiotic theory of the diagrammatic in A Thousand Plateaus. Geophilosophical thinking is based on an idea of relations that originates in Peirce’s diagrammatical iconic sign and is then appropriated by Deleuze and Guattari. The diagrammatical sign has nothing to do with conventions and interpretation, it is pure relation and thus carries signification away. In “Song of Myself” Whitman also mocks meaning: “Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? / Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”22 He calls on the reader to stop and perceive through representation.23 Whitman’s 17 18 19 20

21 22

Deleuze, Essays, 59. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 301–418. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 54. Killingsworth also describes various sexual encounters with different beings. Myrth Jimmie Killingsworth, Walt Whitman and the Earth. A Study in Ecopoetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004) 30f. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 303. Ibid., 30.

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endless anaphoric lists of places, people, and events construct such diagrammatic relations among their elements but also with the world. They do not mean, nor do they imitate, but they deterritorialize and form a line of flight on which the reader, too, can escape. Whitman and Melville (discussed in chapter 3) certainly resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s Romantic Postmodernism. That is why the former two are mentioned several times and discussed in detail in the texts of the latter two. Deleuze and Guattari’s aim, the transgression of the exterior limit through a-limitation, is, however, not yet possible in Romanticism. There are various ways of approaching the limit and many transgressions of interior limits, but the tension inherent in the semiotics of Romanticism, the subject philosophy of Romanticism, and the first acceleration of spatial striation that results in the oscillation between de- and reterritorialization, create a Romantic concept of a-limitation that is not pushed to its limit until Modernism and Postmodernism appear. Whitman tests these boundaries early on when he lets his soul explore infinite space, unbounded by signification and subjectification: This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.24

Following Whitman into Modernism The autodiegetic narrator of Wolfgang Koeppen’s Melancholia (section C) experiences the potential danger of Whitman’s testing of boundaries when he arrives in the United States of America. Koeppen’s short narrative is part of several stories combined under the title Melancholia and first published in that collected form in 1968.25 This narrative (and particularly section C) is ideal for serving as a transitional text between Romanticism and Modernism for two reasons. First, Melancholia alludes to Der goldne Topf and so inscribes itself in the tradition of (fantastic) Romantic literature. The first section is set in a pub in the Elisenhain. The students, the girls, and the snake, which the narrator and the sister find in the woods, resonate with the first vigil of Der goldne Topf (see chapter 3) in which the student Anselmus wants to spend the day in the Linkische Bad but ends up meeting a talking snake. In Koeppen’s text, the snake is mute and crushed, but the other sections show that Romanticism lives on in Modernism. One of the narra23 24 25

Also see Nathanson’s discussion of this passage: Tenney Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence. Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass (New York: New York University Press, 1992) 178. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 369. Excerpts had previously appeared in magazines and other editions as early as 1950. See Wolfgang Koeppen, Gesammelte Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 3. Erzählende Prosa, eds. Marcel ReichRanicki, et al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986) 320.

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tors possibly dies in the ocean when a sorceress conjures a sandstorm: “[…] der […] zu einem Sandsturm wurde, der uns voreinander verhüllte und uns der Nacht und der Einsamkeit auslieferte und vielleicht auch dem weiten Meer”26 (which turned into a sandstorm hid us, enshrouded, from each other and delivering us to the night, to loneliness, and perhaps also to the expansive sea). One of the characters, Prometheus, eats the flowery dress his wife tailored for herself, continuing the tradition of mythical heroes and fantastic occurrences. In the story’s final section a demonic doorbell (reminiscent of the doorknob that turns into the old witch in Der goldne Topf) leads the narrator into a strange hotel. His arrival forces a woman to vacate her room. Her departure alludes to the Archivarius in Der goldne Topf who likes to turn into a bird to fly away: “Sie blickte mich, flügelschlagend, ein kleines Vogelgesicht, mit ihrer letzten Menschlichkeit, einem grausigen, wehen Mitleid an, und dann gesellte sie sich zu den anderen Vögeln, die über dem Flußlauf davon flogen”.27 (She looked at me, beating her wings, a small bird face, with the last bit of her humanity, a frightening and sad sympathy, and then joined the other birds that flew off across the river.) Second, Whitman is literally carried into Modernism. In the Kakfaesque section C, the narrator describes his arrival in the U.S.A.28 In an attempt to rattle the officious immigration officer, he answers “yes” to the question whether he came to the US to assassinate the President. The officers immediately set out to search his luggage, but there is none: Ich habe kein Gepäck, sagte ich, außer diesem Buch hier. Der Vorsitzende riß das Buch an sich und öffnete es; es war eine deutsch-englische Ausgabe der ‘Grashalme’ von Whitman, mein Lehrbuch der Sprache Amerikas. Ich habe es geahnt, sagte der Vorsitzende und erbleichte.29 (I don’t have any luggage, I said, except for this book here. The chairman of the immigration committee grabbed the book and opened it; it was a German-English edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, my textbook for the American language. I suspected this, said the chairman and turned pale.)

He is sentenced to death because the only luggage he carries with him is a copy of Leaves of Grass. Instead of a literal execution, he is brainwashed and becomes a member of the National Guard. Koeppen’s protagonist uses Leaves of Grass ‘only’ as a textbook to learn the language of America. At first glance this statement seems harmless because the revolutionary content of Whitman’s rhizome-book does not seem to contribute to the alleged terrorist’s ideological agenda. As I have shown in chapter 7, however, the language and the semiotic structure of Leaves are perhaps even more revolutionary than its content. Whitman perceived the American language as becoming. 26 27 28

29

Ibid., 194. Ibid., 207. On Kafkaesque elements see Peter Sprengel, “Wolfgang Koeppen. Die Wiederholung der Moderne,” Literarische Moderne. Begriff und Phänomen, eds. Sabina Becker and Helmuth Kiesel (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007) 403–16. Koeppen, Erzählende Prosa, 195.

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Thinking that language needs to be able to represent modern life, he understood it as fluid and changing. Therefore he invented a new language for his new America. Koeppen’s protagonist is equipped with boundary-breaking semiotics. For this reason, he needs to be set straight. With a manifesto of a-limitation in his luggage, the protagonist enters America just as Leaves of Grass entered Europe as a manifesto of Modernism.30 Koeppen is one of the Modernist authors influenced by Whitman. Fragmented narration, questioning of selfhood and authorship, intertextuality, a return to myths, and a spatialization of the narrative process characterize Koeppen’s work.31 Sentences that run four pages long explode narrative conventions. His lists and paratactic sentences are reminiscent of Whitman. So is the dying narrator in Romanisches Café.32 Night, sleep, death, and the stars are easier to reach in Modernist texts such as Koeppen’s. Experiences of the twentieth century change the notion of death and seem to call for a new aesthetics. There is, however, also a discernible continuation of Romantic a-limitation. To give one particularly prominent example: the “heap of broken images” or the “fragments I have shored against my ruins” in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land coincide with a fragmentation of subjectivity into multiple voices and the rapid changing of time and space:33 “I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence. / Oed’ und leer das Meer”.34 In the liminal, smooth space of the outside, language fails the speaker, only to return as a multiplicity of voices and places. Modernist literature draws on old myths, but also on new metaphors of a-limitation offered by new knowledge and technologies. More radical forms of semiotic a-limitation are realized in Modernist poetics (Imagism, Dadaism, etc.) where they are accompanied by intensified subject a-limitation. Gabriele Schwab demonstrates the dissolution of the self in English and American prose texts (Melville, Beckett, Woolf, Pynchon).35 New ways of deterritorializing the city are explored in Berlin Alexanderplatz and Malte Laurids Brigge. The list of examples of a-limitation is infinite. Instead of randomly listing different examples (a systematic approach cannot be provided in this study), I would like to take a look at two spaces in two specific texts: the ocean as the sublime Romantic smooth space and digital space as an example of a (non-)Romantic smooth space in Postmodernism. The ocean as a smooth space of a-limitation remains significant (Eliot’s/Wagner’s “Oed’ und leer das Meer”) in Modernism. In my discussion of Charlotte Smith (chapter 7) 30 31 32 33 34 35

On Koeppen’s narrative and the reception of Whitman in German Modernism see Sprengel, “Wolfgang Koeppen. Die Wiederholung der Moderne,” 403–16. Ibid., 405–07, 12. Ibid., 408f. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Michael North (New York and London: Norton, 2001) 5, 20. Ibid., 6. See Gabriele Schwab, Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen. Zur Subjektivität im modernen Roman (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1987).

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I demonstrated that the sea is culturally striated in the nineteenth century by exploration, tourism, and science. Smith resists these discourses by poetically smoothing the shoreline: she finds caves, darkness, coldness, and remote spots where her literary subjects can indulge their death-wishes. For the German Modernist poet Gottfried Benn and his lost selves, the ocean also provides a space for a-limitation. In his 1913 poem “Gesänge” (Songs), Benn writes about two spaces of a-limitation: the primordial soup in the swamp in song I and the ocean in song II. Darwin’s theory of evolution provides the definition of the subject that Benn deterritorializes in the first stanza of “Gesänge”. The Darwinian subject evolves progressively from lower to higher life forms that culminate in man. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Benn seems to revoke evolution. He provides an example of involution because his speaker wishes he could return to the primordial soup: Oh, dass wir unsre Ur-ur-ahnen wären. Ein Klümpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor. Leben und Tod, Befruchten und Gebären Glitte aus unseren stummen Säften vor. Ein Algenblatt oder ein Dünenhügel: Vom Wind geformtes und nach unten schwer. Schon ein Libellenkopf, ein Möwenflügel Wäre zu weit und litte schon zu sehr. – 36 (If only we could be our ancient ancestors. A lump of slime in a warm moor. Life and death, inseminating and birthing Would slide out of our dumb juices. A leaf of algae or a dune: Shaped by the wind and bottom-heavy. Even a dragonfly’s head, a seagull’s wing Would be too far and would suffer too much. – )37

This song calls for the return of the human being to inorganic matter. There is no transcendent movement (no upwards or forwards) but a heavy, sluggish wish to erase human progress by a return to its origins. The first two lines end with a period or a colon. They are short, and the second line of each stanza remains fragmentary because it is missing a verb. There is no semiotic action in the speaker. The third and fourth lines are connected by an enjambment and include a verb. They accelerate the semiotic movement, but then come to a halt again. More than simple regression takes place in this first song. A collective speaker (wir/we) reverses evolution for all mankind. Becoming-animal 36 37

Gottfried Benn, Gedichte in der Fassung der Erstdrucke, ed. Bruno Hillebrand (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2006) 47. Translation with small changes adapted from: Peter Sprengel, “Fantasies of the Origin and Dreams of Breeding. Darwinism in German and Austrian Literature around 1900,” Monatshefte 102.4 (2010) 473. For more on Benn and evolution also consult this article.

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(dragonfly or seagull) does not go far enough. Humanity needs to involute to collective becoming-slime or becoming-imperceptible. Transcendent notions of the One or All are replaced by a Darwinian concept that renders the individual indistinguishable from all other potential individuals. In the second song, however, God returns: Verächtlich sind die Liebenden, die Spötter, Alles Verzweifeln, Sehnsucht und wer hofft. Wir sind so schmerzliche, durchseuchte Götter. – Und dennoch denken wir des Gottes oft. Die weiche Bucht. Die dunklen Wälderträume. Die Sterne schneeballblütengross und schwer. Die Panther springen lautlos durch die Bäume. Alles ist Ufer. Ewig ruft das Meer. – 38 (The lovers are contemptuous, those mocking, Everything desperation, longing and who hopes. We are such painful, contaminated Gods. – And yet we often think of God. The soft bay. The dark forest dreams. The stars the size of snowball blossoms and heavy. The panthers silently jump through the trees Everything is a shore. The ocean calls eternally. –)39

Despite the desperation and the pain now attributed to God, they are still part of the longing. In this context, the second stanza could depict a fantasy of transcendence. It seems to comprise all the necessary ingredients: a dark forest (night), the stars, silence, and the eternal ocean enticing the speaker to enter into the water. The phrase “Everything is a shore” points to space as a boundary zone. Liminality is no longer an exceptional status, but a universal principle in Modernist fantasies of transcendence. The two songs offer two different spaces and two different ways of a-limitation: involution back into the swamp, or transcendence into the ocean.

House of Leaves as example of Postmodernist a-limitation In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the spaces into which the subject can dissolve or the spaces which offer smooth alternatives to a striated world only change marginally. The most radical new space in contemporary literature is probably digital space. Our age could be roughly described as a liminal time between analogous space (the text as book or the subject as body) and digital space (hypertexts and subjects as pure infor38 39

Benn, Gedichte, 47. My translation except for the last line, which is taken from: Sprengel, “Fantasies of Origin,” 473.

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mation). Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves constitutes an appropriately liminal text. Like Koeppen’s Melancholia or Benn’s “Gesänge” it shows traces of Romantic texts and Romantic a-limitation, but it surpasses Romantic a-limitation through technological and poetic innovation. The most apparent allusion to Romanticism (and Romantic alimitation) is the house at the novel’s center. An uncanny house that seems to be alive and drives its inhabitants mad and whose story is told by a highly unreliable narrator alludes to Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.40 This is a Romantic a-limitation triad: house-inhabitants-narration or sign-subject-space. Poe’s House of Usher is not the only Romantic intertext, though. In his manuscript The Navidson Record one of the multiple narrators writes that many scholars have tried to ascertain what is fact and what is fiction in the film he is discussing. He, on the other hand, attempts an analysis based solely on the interpretation of the film itself: “This direction seems more promising, even if the house itself, like Melville’s behemoth, remains resistant to summation”.41 There are several narrators who are trying to decipher the house – a multiple Ishmael who acknowledges the impossibility of a stable signified. The house itself, a building erected on Ash Tree Lane in 1720 and purchased and documented by Navidson, is a “strange spatial violation”.42 Its inside is bigger than its outside. This physical impossibility is confirmed by several measurements: The house is a smooth space that eludes striation through tapes or technology. It is also a dangerous space that grows dark hallways, growls, and kills. This uncanny Gothic space is adequately represented through embedded narratives. In Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (see chapter 3), a manuscript offers the reader (and the protagonist of the frame narrative) the possibility to explore many related and overlapping narratives in order to explore Melmoth’s secret. The narrative deferral of the signifier together with the uncanny ekphrasis,43 the notion of uncertain identity, and the vast spatial transgressions of Melmoth are example of Romantic a-limitation. House of Leaves adopts the method and develops it further. A manuscript is found in a dead man’s apartment, and although the finder contemplates the option (like young Melmoth), it is not burned and not a coherent tale. Like in Melmoth’s manuscript there are 40 41

42 43

See, for example, Jessica Pressman, “House of Leaves. Reading the Networked Novel,” Studies in American Fiction 34.1 (2006): 112. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000) 3. There are several other mentions of whales, among these Whalestone, the institution in which the mother of one of the narrators lives. This name alludes to something that swallows mad people. The other interesting parallel worth exploring is the role of ink and tattoos and labyrinths in House of Leaves in relation to Moby-Dick (see chapter 3). Ibid., 24. The Navidson Record, the manuscript written by Zampanó, is also an uncanny ekphrasis because it influences its reader, Johnny Truant, and turns him into a sign, too. At one point, he is confronted with his book before he has actually completed it. This becoming-sign has different connotations from Novalis’s Ofterdingen (see chapter 3). Becoming-book is a disturbing experience for Johnny.

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blanks, omissions, and illegible passages. Unlike Melmoth’s manuscript, this one also has footnotes (and footnotes on footnotes), different fonts, colors, and marginalia. House of Leaves is a typographic spectacle that shows what texts can do on a page: become red and crossed out, blue, bigger, smaller, hide in corners, move into boxes, become italicized, bold, run along margins, form circles, leave pages almost blank, become pictures and paintings, etc. The idea of the embedded text is further enlarged by different media: Navidson, a photographer, films the house; Zampanó, a blind old man, writes a semi-scholarly work on the film. Johnny Truant, assistant in a tattoo shop, finds the manuscript, assembles it, and adds his own associations as footnotes. Nameless editors officially publish the book adding their own footnotes and several appendices, one of them a collection of letters. Nancy Katherine Hayles argues that the spatial arrangement of the signs on the pages and the narrative multiplicity represented through spatial form point towards the genre of hypertext: “Instead of temporal sequence indicated by spatial continuity, House of Leaves uses spatial discontinuity to indicate temporal simultaneity. This multiplicity is characteristic of hypertext, which Jane Yellowlees Douglas and others have identified as a rhetorical form having multiple reading paths, chunked text, and a linking mechanism connecting the chunks”.44 This hypertextual poetics points to a severe deterritorialization of the text. Other semiotic artifacts support this conclusion: an official homepage and an album, Haunted (the interpreter calls herself Poe), are linked to the book. Thus the book, which already has digital technology as its “spectre in the background” becomes part of a “networked assemblage”.45 During her reading process, the reader skips back and forth between the Navidson Record and the extensive footnotes. Further along in the book, the reader also skips to the margins or to the blue boxes which contain more information on the house. The reader constantly has to undertake boundary crossings. He has to find his own way through the pages, deciding which thread to follow. His integration into the text surpasses direct addresses (Moby-Dick and Jerusalem) and realizes Novalis’s call for the reader to figure as the extended author more fully than Romantic texts did.46 The Navidson Record integrates Johnny Truant into its text and thus illustrates what happens to the real reader when he skims through the rhizomatic passages or even contributes to discussions on the website’s blog.47 Truant’s description of finding and working on the manuscript starts as follows: “His word – my word, maybe even your word – added to

44 45

46 47

N. Katharine Hayles, “Saving the Subject. Remediation in House of Leaves,” American Literature 74.4 (2002): 795. Pressman, “House of Leaves. Reading the Networked Novel,” 111, 13. Also consult Pressman for further arguments supporting the digital nature of House of Leaves. She reads the blue print of the word ‘house’ in the novel as a hyperlink. On the reader also see Hayles, “Saving the Subject. Remediation in House of Leaves,” 803. See Danielewski’s homepage: Z. 27 Aug. 2011. .

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this, and ringing inside me like some awful dream, over and over again…”.48 Truant describes the reader’s inclusion, but also the reader’s inclusion into the book. Since I have underlined this sentence and put a comment in the margin because the passage is of interest to me, I, the reader, have performed exactly what Truant describes in this sentence and I, too, have become part of the book. These findings point to a new and more radical form of the rhizomatic book – one for which Deleuze and Guattari did not yet have examples when they wrote A Thousand Plateaus. It surpasses Blake’s illuminated plate-plateaus and Whitman’s Leaves-inprogress. Yet, it is also subjected to the same liminal semiotics as Romanticism. Whitman’s Leaves is a rhizomatic book because the leaves are not just leaves of grass but also of paper. They preserve their ‘leafness’ through their asignifying characteristics by which they present rather than represent (see chapter 7). House of Leaves is a book in a book, but it is also the book itself (House of Leaves). This blurs, as several critics have noted, the boundary between the house and the paper leaves of the book.49 The house cannot be defined and the different layers of text cannot explain it. In fact, they also start falling apart when their narrators deteriorate. Without a doubt, House of Leaves is rhizomatic. There is, however, also the other side of the Romantic sign: the magic sign that signifies when the right key to unlock its meaning has been found, the sign that presents the world and the truth. House of Leaves is not an asignifying symbolic book. First of all, there are coherent stories within the book, one of them a generic horror story about an uncanny house. Secondly, it is a highly iconic and indexical book, a book that demonstrates how iconic (or natural) signs function. The blue color of the word ‘house’ refers the reader to the blue boxes that provide more information about the house. The different fonts indicate different writing subjects. As Pressman points out, the typeface “enacts its content” (performing one of the basic iconic functions of language).50 Single words on a blank page mirror the disorientation of the subjects. The reader has to turn the page when the subjects move to the other side. Hayles also argues that there is a mimetic change of speed in events and speed of reading.51 While chapter 9 comprises dense textual passages and many digressions that slow the reader down, chapter 10 has little print, which mirrors the action in the narrative. These changes of speed smooth the reading experience, but they are also part of the iconic nature of the book. House of Leaves is a diagrammatic book. It has a symbolic side that is difficult to decipher and that is mirrored in complex spatial movements. But it also has an iconic side that diagrammatically tells the reader what the subjects experience in their exploration of the house.

48 49 50 51

Danielewski, House of Leaves, 48. See, for example, Pressman, “House of Leaves. Reading the Networked Novel,” 113. Ibid., 117. See Hayles, “Saving the Subject. Remediation in House of Leaves,” 796ff.

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In Romanticism there is a tension between signifying and asignifying signs. Sometimes the pages are walls or words and sometimes they are illuminated. Spatially, the book oscillates between different speeds and different modes of perception. It contains the description of a film by a blind man as well as a film that delineates what it means to have lost sight (the inside of the house is a dark infinite space). Efforts to striate the house fail, but striation is nevertheless part of the process. Different fonts and colors, footnotes, annexes and paratexts striate the smooth space of the text. Finally, subjectivity is at stake in the novel, but is not abandoned. All of the narrators and protagonists are in danger of dying or succumbing to madness, but they are also reterritorialized over and over again through their manifestation in print.52 Hayles puts it this way: “In House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski has found a way to subvert and have his subject at the same time”.53 It is the Romantic way. Under the premise that a house is larger on the inside than on the outside, House of Leaves literally attempts what Deleuze and Guattari attempted philosophically: to think the unthinkable. It confronts us with experimental textuality, with spatial impossibilities, and with deteriorating subjects. Yet, it is still a book that can be read and understood. Of course, the house has to be larger on the inside because the sign is always larger on the inside. It always means more than the signifier declares to its interpreter. There is an external boundary that even House of Leaves cannot reach, but its interior boundary crossings are frequent and more intense than those found in Romantic texts. The fact that the book (House of Leaves) is slightly bigger than its cover, however, reassures the reader that even this book has visible spatial (and semiotic) boundaries. The book once more iconically represents the house – but, luckily, the reader can leave it at any time.

52 53

See ibid., 790. Ibid., 779.

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