Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien 9781780937304, 9781474218627, 9781780938363

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
Introduction: Dreams for realities
1. The willing suspension of disbelief
2. Poetic faith
3. The willing resumption of disbelief
Conclusion: Potent art
Works cited
Index

Citation preview

Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-fi rst century.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY: Blake. Wordsworth. Religion, Jonathan Roberts Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke Do the Gods Wear Capes? Ben Saunders England’s Secular Scripture, Jo Carruthers Forgiveness in Victorian Literature, Richard Hughes Gibson Glyph and the Gramophone, Luke Ferretter The Gospel According to the Novelist, Magdalena Maczynska Jewish Feeling, Richa Dwor John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger Late Walter Benjamin, John Schad The New Atheist Novel, Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse, Samantha Zacher Victorian Parables, Susan E. Colón

FORTHCOMING: Faithful Reading, Mark Knight and Emma Mason Romantic Enchantment, Gavin Hopps Sufi sm in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Ziad Elmarsafy

Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien MICHAEL TOMKO Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Michael Tomko, 2016 Michael Tomko has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3730-4 PB: 978-1-3500-3602-4 ePDF: 978-1-7809-3836-3 ePub: 978-1-7809-3592-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

For Greg So my Friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape . . . – Coleridge, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

CONTENTS

List of figures viii Acknowledgments x List of abbreviations xii

Introduction: Dreams for realities 1 1 The willing suspension of disbelief 19 2 Poetic faith 65 3 The willing resumption of disbelief 109 Conclusion: Potent art 145 Works cited 153 Index 167

FIGURES

1.1 George Cruikshank, “A Radical Reformer,—(i.e.) A Neck or Nothing Man! Dedicated to the Heads of the Nation.” London: Thomas Tegg, 1819. © Trustees of the British Museum. 22 1.2 W. W. Denslow, “The eyes looked at her thoughtfully.” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Chicago and New York: George M. Hill, 1900. Reproduced courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. 24 1.3 George Cruikshank, “Monstrosities of 1822.” Cruikshankiana. London: McLean, 1835. Reproduced courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library, Special Collections. 25 1.4 George Cruikshank, “Backside & front view of the Ladies Fancy Man, Paddy Carey O’Killus.” London, 1822. © Trustees of the British Museum. 26 1.5 Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1813. Reproduced courtesy of Princeton University Library. 28

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1.6 W. W. Denslow, “Exactly so! I am a humbug.” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Chicago and New York: George M. Hill, 1900. Reproduced courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. 36

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is an exciting time to be involved in the study of religion and literature. There are new works of fiction from writers such as Marilynne Robinson or Uwem Akpan; the new poems of Dana Gioia, Kevin Hart, or Geoffrey Hill; new critical movements such as postsecularism, accompanied by “religious turns” in unexpected places; new theological resources emerging from the dense philosophical meditations of Jean-luc Marion or from the battle over Chesterton’s armor between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank; and new insights from global revisions of our sociological and historical models of religion by Philip Jenkins and Lamin Sanneh. While all these new figures and others emerge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might seem like one who should remain behind, a dissonant note for this rising chorus. As a poet and a contributor to literary theory, he has had his day. Indeed, to many studying religion and literature, he might appear as part of an old way of thinking about literary criticism. Coleridge can loom as what Blake denounced as a covering cherub or a “Nobodaddy,” a figure of established institutional authority who guards the books with solemn thought, occluding and obstructing attempts to view our cultural landscape again. So, I am particularly grateful to my editors Mark Knight and Emma Mason, as well as to David Avital, Mark Richardson, and those at Bloomsbury, for welcoming this book on Coleridge into the New Directions in Religion and Literature book series. Coleridge can disappoint, frustrate, and baffle. I believe, however, that there is new wine in these old wineskins, and that thinking with him remains a living joy. There are many who have shared that joy with me in some way, sometimes unawares. In particular, I would like to thank Tom Blackburn, Lori Branch, Phil Cardinale, Joseph Drury, Richard Eldridge, Nathan Hensley, Michael John Kooy, Chris Koenig-

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Woodyard, Jon Mee, Susannah Monta, Lucy Newlyn, Evan Radcliffe, Juan Sanchez, John Saward, Fiona Stafford, Michael Ward, Suzanne Webster, and the late Jonathan Wordsworth. This book ultimately makes an argument that reading literature well requires wisdom from other disciplines. I am fortunate to teach in Villanova University’s Humanities department, an interdisciplinary program whose members live that idea in their gracious and delightful dedication to learning. Teaching alongside theologians, philosophers, classicists, political theorists, historians, and economists, I have benefitted greatly from the dappled intellects of my generous colleagues: Jesse Couenhoven, Margaret Grubiak, Mary Hirschfeld, Gene McCarraher, Anna Moreland, David Schindler, Jeanne Schindler, Mark Shiffman, Thomas W. Smith, Helena Tomko, James M. Wilson, and particularly my chair, Kevin Hughes. Thank you as well to the generations of Humanities students who have thought through many of these questions with me, particularly in the “Human Person” Gateway seminar. Villanova has also supported my research with a VERITAS faculty research grant. Thank you too to the indefatigable book review staff of Religion and Literature and my teaching assistant Jessica Swoboda for their patience while I worked on this book. Above all, I am grateful to and for Helena and my family, for their love and support. An earlier, shorter version of the second chapter appeared in Victorian Studies, and I am grateful for their permission to revisit that material here. I am also indebted to the assistance of the staff of Oxford’s Boldleian Library Upper Reading Room; Michael Foight and Laura Bang of Villanova’s Special Collections; Marianne Hansen of the Bryn Mawr College Library; AnnaLee Pauls, Sandra Calabrese, and Stephen Ferguson of Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, and Lynne Farrington and John Pollack of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, this book advances a historically and politically aware approach to literary criticism that also embraces the beauties and feelings of aesthetic experience. No one has embodied that ideal for me and for so many others—as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a mentor—more than Greg Kucich. It is a delight to dedicate this book to him.

ABBREVIATIONS

AR BL CL CM CN C&S Friend LitLects 1808–19 Logic LS OED PLects PW SC SM SWF TT TW

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Aids to Refl ection. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Marginalia. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On the Constitution of the Church and State. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Friend. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Logic. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. A Lay Sermon. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1989. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures 1818–1819 On the History of Philosophy. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Poetical Works. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shakespearean Criticism. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Statesman’s Manual. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shorter Works and Fragments. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Table Talk. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Watchman.

Introduction: Dreams for realities The “willing suspension of disbelief” is a phrase, like Freudian slip or Pavlovian response, that has made the rare transition from high intellectual discourse to pop culture, appearing everywhere from television commercials to the floor of the US Congress.1 The romantic critic Thomas McFarland labels the phrase not only “very famous” but also “supremely famous” and claims it as “undoubtedly the single most famous critical formulation in all of English literature” (Shapes 118, “Imagination and Illusion” 337). The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge may have been one of the most influential thinkers within Anglo-American literary theory, but he is rarely credited for what may be his most renowned contribution: coining the term in his 1817 Biographia Literaria as “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (BL 2: 6). In common parlance, it is used to describe our acceptance in art of the most fantastic worlds whose premises, actions, or outcomes we would question or reject in reality. During one week in 1997, Coleridge’s biographer Richard Holmes recorded “seven separate uses of the phrase in newspaper articles and radio programmes variously describing films, books, drama, and scientific theories” (130n). None mentioned Coleridge. Today, equivalent Internet searches provide results too voluminous to sift, with the romantic poet playing only a small part in the algorithms’ results. Even though Coleridge’s thought has laid the intellectual foundations for critical movements as disparate as the analytic psychological criticism of I. A. Richards, the formalism of Cleanth Brooks and the New Critics, the “natural supernaturalism” of M. H. Abrams, and the poststructuralist interplay of pragmatism and deconstruction of Kathleen Wheeler, literary critics have not given

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the phrase sustained academic consideration. 2 Since “the willing suspension of disbelief” is, in McFarland’s estimate, as “well known to intellectuals as any five words in the language” (Shapes 117), critics have tended to use it as common property. In a chapter titled “The Novel and Other Discourses of Suspended Belief” in the important critical volume Practicing New Historicism (2000), Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt—unrivaled in their attentiveness to the historically embedded, contextual origins of literary language—deploy the term with only the most fleeting, parenthetical glance toward Coleridge (169). In contrast with Gallagher and Greenblatt’s unexamined appropriation, this study not only focuses on the “willing suspension of disbelief” but also does so through the manifold lens of Coleridge’s literary, philosophical, and theological thought, often so rich and fruitful in its perspicacity and yet also so frustrating and disorienting in its fragmentation. By exploring Coleridge’s characteristic turn to the theological language of belief and faith, I will argue that the “suspension of disbelief” in tandem with “poetic faith” means much more than its current connotation of a begrudging toleration of the fabulous. This approach departs from those of Richards, Abrams, and others in their wake that have tended to neglect Coleridge’s lifelong religious engagement and have even seen him as enabling a secularized literary studies whose sine qua non was the relegation of theology. 3 This book thus joins both the general study of “romantic religious politics” and the recent recovery of Coleridge’s intertwined religious and literary imagination by critics such as Jeffrey Barbeau, Douglas Hedley, Graham Neville, Philip Rule, Suzanne Webster, and Luke S. H. Wright.4 It argues that a “new” Coleridge, who is read beyond the assumptions of secularization, can offer fresh and rewarding insights into current questions about how and why to read literature that have emerged in the very titles of John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? (2005), Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem (2007), Mark Edmundson’s Why Read? (2004), and Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter? (1992). In particular, Coleridge’s own reflective experience of reading amid revolution and reaction can help us to ask how we critique the social and ideological power exerted against us in literature without subsequently losing the beneficial power of literature to help us flourish as individuals and cohere as communities. The result will be what might be

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called a “postsecular Coleridge” who offers a literary theory that fully engages the human faculties of both faith and reason and thus enables a rich aesthetic encounter while remaining politically responsible. 5 Before developing these wider implications, I will outline the constitutive elements of the “willing suspension of disbelief” and the fundamental questions they raise about literature. The seminal passage comes from the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria in which Coleridge seeks to explain the aims of Wordsworth’s and his own complementary contributions to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge claimed that his own “endeavours” were to be: . . . directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (BL 2: 6) This section has been one of the most controversial in the Biographia, leading scholars to investigate the biographical and thematic accuracy of Coleridge’s claims about the collection. Yet apart from its account of publication history, the passage has enjoyed a theoretical afterlife and become one of the most referenced of Coleridge’s writing. Coleridge himself would return to its ideas in his letters, essays, and marginalia. In the foreword to Literature and Belief (1958), M. H. Abrams provides a usefully concise gloss of its common and critical usage in which the “skilled reader in some fashion suspends his disbelief so as to go along in imagination with express judgments and doctrines from which he would ordinarily dissent” (viii). Under its auspices, a skeptical age may have poetic access to antiquated or fantastic ideas (Abrams cites Dante’s worlds and Coleridge’s sentiment of “He prayeth best” in The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) that would otherwise be intolerable and offensive to the intellect (viii).6 The appropriately vague and noncommittal phrase “going along in imagination,” in its informality and imprecision, conveys the contumacious nod of temporary imaginative tolerance to an unenlightened or naive poet that the “suspension of disbelief” often implies. Likewise, philosopher Kendall Walton sees the “traditional term” of the

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“suspension of disbelief” as leaving a reader split between a part of the self that “believes something which another part of him disbelieves” or stuck “(almost?) believing something which he nevertheless knows to be false” (15, 7). An early Coleridge critic, Earl Leslie Griggs, further delineates the central ideas associated with the passage: The “willing suspension of disbelief” or “dramatic illusion” describes a state of mind in which the reader or spectator voluntarily relinquishes his usual propensity to judge in terms of possibility or reality. Whatever is presented to him must seem, therefore, to be probable while it is before him. Such a suspension of the will and comparative power, however, presupposes a state of excitement induced by the poet and must be won gradually and sustained by his art and craftsmanship. (279) Griggs’s list represents both Coleridge’s main points and the tradition of aesthetic inquiry from which he draws. First, the audience member’s decision to engage with an artwork is voluntary and remains voluntary throughout the aesthetic experience. Second, to be maintained, the suspension of the “comparative power” needs some standard of probability or coherence within the work. Third, plausibility is not enough to sustain this suspension. The poet’s craft must rouse the spectator’s “excitement,” must get her believing and keep her believing. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Griggs offers the “willing suspension of disbelief” and “dramatic illusion” as equivalent ideas. Attempts to understand “dramatic illusion” frequently use the analogy of the “drama as dream,” with Prospero’s masque in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a key text. British theaters in Coleridge’s era had an amazing power to represent what Prospero called “direful spectacle” in that play’s opening act (I.ii.26). To recreate the naval battles of the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century, Sadler’s Wells theater was turned into an “aquatic theatre of war” with replica ships afloat (Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 28). To dramatize a cavalry charge against a fortified castle, a score of horses thundered across the stage at Covent Garden. The special effects of a candle-lit altar going suddenly ablaze to reveal an illuminated portrait of an assassination—further heightened by the haunting chant of

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boatmen around a dark Spanish convent chapel—overshadowed the subtle psychological examination of crime and character in Coleridge’s 1813 gothic play Remorse (PW 3.2: 1101–7; Burwick, Illusion, 268). Such technological—even nautical and zoological— dramaturgy retrospectively surprises and astounds with its ability to make audience members part of the action.7 And yet, when it came to the opening of Prospero’s own play, The Tempest, wet mariners struggled amid a terrible storm while the audience remained resolutely dry—a meteorological miracle not plausible even in Britain. In his recent book Faith in Shakespeare (2013), Richard McCoy writes, “Within the plot, that art is magical, but within the theater, that art is stagecraft, a product of ‘tempestuous’ sound effects, stage directions, and speech, and we are happily fooled by it through our own willing suspension of disbelief” (149). In discussing this scene, McCoy joins both a long tradition of critics who draw on Coleridge’s formulation and a recent upsurge in critics including Gallagher and Susannah Brietz Monta who return to him for addressing current problems in literary theory. McCoy’s discussion captures how this simple, short phrase addresses the complex and nuanced relationships between artwork and audience, between domination and delight, between foolishness and desired effect, which are further complicated within The Tempest itself. Proceeding from this turbid prelude to an unknown island in which unseen spirits appear, the fantastic world staged in Shakespeare’s fi nal play is almost incredible. Raising questions of aesthetic belief in its themes and through its very staging, this play prompted Coleridge to elaborate his thinking on the “willing suspension of disbelief” in his literary lectures on Shakespeare and in his characteristically vining critical marginalia. Coleridge labeled The Tempest a “Romantic drama,” a work of and for the imagination that seems “independent of all historical facts and associations,” that “owns no allegiance to Time and Place,” and that counts “errors in Chronology and Geography . . . for nothing” (LitLects 1808–19 2: 268). The action on the island is no less daring in its departure from reality. In Act I, Prospero’s magical “art” not only caused the shipwreck but also charmed his daughter Miranda to sleep with a few words, incidents Coleridge described as going “beyond our ordinary belief” (I.ii.28; LitLects 1808–19 1: 362). The play involutes a narrative of the usurped Prospero’s political restoration not only with a familiar story of

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love in Miranda and Ferdinand’s irenic courtship, but also with the exceedingly unfamiliar servants of Prospero: the orcishly earthy Caliban and the “fanciful and delicate” Ariel, a “preternaturally” unprecedented elfin spirit requiring, according to Coleridge, further “poetic faith” from the audience (LitLects 1808–19 1: 362). Yet the play may be most remarkable for Prospero’s play-within-theplay, or what the romantic critic Leigh Hunt called the “Mask in a drama” (“Some Account” 122). Having won the audience’s assent to excesses of unreality in The Tempest, Shakespeare allows this masque to crash into nothingness before the confused eyes of Ferdinand and Miranda and the now incredulous eyes of the audience: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.i.148–58) The caveat was gratuitous for the young couple, who had not been deluded into thinking the vision reality but who were concerned with the magisterial and unpredictable Prospero’s unexplained agitation, his curt dismissal of the actor-spirits into the void. The speech famously expands into Prospero’s anthropological musing that life is but a waking dream. This speculation, however, is built on an analogy comparing our existence on the globe to the illusory performance of a play, particularly the one staged in Shakespeare’s own Globe theater. The metaphysical claim about our “insubstantial” world thus relies on the previous premise that art is merely “baseless.” Amid the ongoing drama, the speech reminds audience members that they, in Coleridge’s words, “chuse to be deceived” not only by Prospero’s mask but also by Shakespeare’s drama (LitLects 1808–19 2: 266). “I have often thought of Shakespear as the mighty wizard himself,” Coleridge imagined of

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Prospero from the start, echoing critics who hear the bard’s voice in this culminating, valedictory moment as well (LitLects 1808–19 2: 266). If so, Shakespeare exits while imparting the message that the dramatic vision of The Tempest and of all his works has been mere illusion. This book pursues the questions that necessarily follow from this moment of realization. Their scope is not confined to the drama. The questions about our awareness of aesthetic illusion are at the heart of literary theory, which inquires into the nature of literary art and the purpose of literature in human life. First, how can we continue to believe in and engage with an artwork that we know to be an illusion and thus, in some way, unreal? For Coleridge, who conflates our responses to poems, novels, and plays (LitLects 1808–19 2: 266), this difficulty does not arise only from a “stage-illusion” in which a darkened theater with a sturdy roof contains a stormy sea, but rather from any instance of an artistic imitation of reality that requires “a sort of temporary Half-faith” (LitLects 1808–19 1: 134). Second, why do we need to believe in aesthetic illusions? What goods in human life are dependent on this belief? Just as the dissolving masque invites Prospero’s reflections on his world and our puzzlement over this incident’s purpose for the play’s characters, so too do Coleridge’s literary meditations on The Tempest wind around considerations of philosophy, theology, psychology, teleology, and ethics. Finally, aesthetic illusion raises pressing political questions. What are the dangers of believing in an aesthetic illusion, of being charmed by Prospero? Are there inherent political risks to our individual autonomy or our collective judgment that characterize, or even encompass, the power of aesthetic illusion? With regards to our fi rst major question about belief in fi ction, Prospero’s famous metaphor that confounded our response to stage illusion with dreaming preoccupied many of the greatest thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Henry Home, A. W. Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Gottfried Herder. As Frederick Burwick points out in Illusion and the Drama (1991), “Reference to the ‘waking dream’ is such a commonplace in eighteenth-century criticism that we can scarcely exclude any of the major accounts of aesthetic illusion” (197). Burwick not only includes “Diderot and Rousseau in France; Lessing, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn in Germany,” but

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also adds Erasmus Darwin to this illustrious list (197). In these accounts, dreaming tends to exemplify an ambivalent middle state in which the dreamer responds to images as if they were real, despite knowing that they are not. In his marginalia on The Tempest, Coleridge writes: It is laxly said, that during Sleep we take our Dreams for Realities, but this is irreconcilable with the nature of Sleep, which consists in a suspension of the voluntary and therefore of the comparative power. The fact is, that we pass no judgement either way—we simply do not judge them to be real, in conseq. of which the Images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images. Our state while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a deeply interesting novel in the degree rather than in the Kind. . . . (CM 4: 781)8 In a dream, the relinquishing of the “comparative power” yields what seems a passive reception of the sundry images that present themselves to the mind. Gone is the striving to determine whether these sensations correspond to external reality. Instead, they are accepted as if they were representative of reality without, crucially, the concession that they are. The mind does not obtain, or even seek, certainty, but it proceeds nevertheless. The power dynamic in linking dreaming to the stage, as well as to other genres, was a consistent undercurrent in this discourse. Home writes that any aggressive or violent action will rouse a passive audience member who “awakes as from a pleasing dream, and, gathering his sense about him, finds all to be fiction” (399–400). Schlegel claims that “the theatrical as well as every other poetical illusion is a waking dream, to which we voluntarily surrender ourselves” (246).9 Schiller returns to dreaming and drama, writing of the tension between an unrealized higher reality artistically displayed and the ontological status of the stage: . . . he [the serious audience member] will acknowledge on the stage that moral government of the world which he fails to discover in real life. But he is, at the same time, perfectly aware that all is an empty show, and that, in a true sense, he is feeding only on dreams. (225)

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Does Schiller’s perfect awareness protest too much in dismissing the possibility that dreams might become the stuff of nightmares? Dreaming is solitary, but the drama is a social nexus. The resulting question of authorial control presents itself clearly in Herder’s essay on Shakespeare: The poet’s space and time lie in the movement of his great event, in the ordine successivorum et simultaneorum of his world. How and where does he transport you? As long as he sees to it that you are transported, you are in his world. However quickly or slowly he causes the course of time to pass, it is he who makes it pass: it is he who impresses its sequence upon you: that is his measure of time. And what a master Shakespeare is in this respect too! (174) The poet or dramatist has the powers not of a creator, but of the Creator. The audience member is in his world, of which he has an absolute control that extends to the laws of time and space. For Herder, the willing nature of our transport to this ruled microcosm, however, counteracts the seeming imbalance of power between audience and author. Like Schlegel’s “voluntarily surrender” of ourselves, Home also describes the audience member’s volitional acquiescence at the outset: While the dialogue goes on, a thousand particulars concur to delude us into an impression of reality; genuine sentiments, passionate language, and persuasive gesture: the spectator once engaged, is willing to be deceived, loses sight of himself, and without scruple enjoys the spectacle as a reality. (454) We thus choose to be put under the spell of the dramatist and to enter his world, his reality. Unlike those who were shipwrecked on Prospero’s island, we sail there on our own accord. We, as Herder writes, transpose ourselves into a dream (174). Yet even so, a consciousness and even fear of Prospero’s artistry remains in interpretations of the The Tempest, registered in the disturbing remixing of reality in Prospero’s Books (1991) or the fierce vindictiveness of Helen Mirren’s Prospera in the 2010 film version of the play. What becomes clear from this brief but representative survey is that the dream of the drama necessitates an account of

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the audience’s perception of fiction and reality as well as the role of power in that relationship. This question of volition and power is central because it opens the door both to possibility and to vulnerability. In Coleridge’s tumultuous time, the political facet of aesthetic illusion became unavoidable. From the beginning of his career to its conclusion, poetry was inseparable from politics. A youthful, radical Coleridge founded and edited a journal titled The Watchman, designed to “proclaim the State of the Political Atmosphere, and preserve Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins!!” (TW 6). Coleridge found it natural to accompany news reports and parliamentary speeches with “Original Essays and Poetry,” and the fi rst number included his own “To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution” (TW 27–9). Although Coleridge’s own political views shifted substantially during his lifetime, in his last major published work, On the Constitution of Church and State (1829), he saw the “Literae Humaniores, the products of the genial power” having “an immediate and positive value, even in their bearings on the national interests” (C&S 54n). Contemporary criticism has recovered this political valence and emphasized the importance of critiquing the ideological collusion of aesthetic illusion with power. Back in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Edward Said argued that, far from detached dreams, aesthetic works “even in their most rarified form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly” (35). Critics who fail to recognize this implication in reality allow these illusions to perpetuate their unacknowledged power over others and thus license “a culture to cloak itself in the particular authority of certain values over others” (53). A model of critically “decloaking” aesthetic power has perhaps nowhere been in more evident practice than in New Historicism, which has cast muchneeded light on the ways that colonialism, gender, nationalism, and racial and ethnic suppression have been neglected by both formalist and historical critical schools, often with startling results. Stephen Greenblatt’s enlightening Learning to Curse (1990) identifies the Prospero who dominates and degrades the enslaved Caliban as complicit with Early Modern Europe’s broader enterprise of “conquest, conversion, and settlement” in

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the New World (16). The critique goes further than simply shifting the focus of our sociological attention from the Italy of Prospero’s exile to the exotic outpost on which he rules as master. Greenblatt identifies Prospero’s power as a “linguistic colonialism” based on his knowledge of the magical language in his books (16). This creative potency, which enables Prospero to transform and control reality, makes Greenblatt’s critique not just a revision of a particular protagonist, but an indictment of aesthetic ideology itself. Coleridge’s identification of Shakespeare with Prospero becomes suddenly more unsettling when Greenblatt identifies the necromantic playwright as a nascent imperialist: The problem for critics has been to accommodate this perceived resemblance between dramatist and colonist with a revulsion that reaches from the political critiques of colonialism in our own century back to the moral outrage of Las Casas and Montaigne. (24) The lineage Greenblatt here traces to two of the most important voices of conscience and dissent in Western culture should preempt attempts to dismiss these postcolonial concerns as fads born of political correctness. In the romantic period, William Hazlitt, the impassioned critic who, according to Duncan Wu, “foresaw a time when people would claim the right to speak on their own account, and determine the composition of their own government” (xxiii), also reacted against the wizard whose “art” both crafts the drama’s hymeneal masque and sinks vessels with “wild waters” (I.ii.1,2). Known for critically dissecting works of poets and playwrights that toadied up to tyranny, Hazlitt described Prospero in politically laden language as one whose “sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition” (Characters 242).10 Hazlitt strongly recoiled from a staging of The Tempest by John Philip Kemble whose Shakespeare productions, according to Jane Moody, “represented a magnificent and spectacular advertisement for the political establishment” (“Romantic Shakespeare” 44). Hazlitt, as the drama critic for Hunt’s reformist journal The Examiner, complained of Kemble’s safely muted version in which Prospero “did not appear the potent wizard brooding in gloomy abstraction over the secrets of his art, and around whom spirits and airy shapes throng numberless

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‘at his bidding’” (“The Tempest” 236).11 So severe was Hazlitt’s reaction against this excision of the political valence of Prospero’s Napoleonic complex that he made an impassioned renunciation at the beginning of his review: As we returned some evenings ago from seeing The Tempest at Covent Garden, we almost came to the resolution of never going to another representation of a play of Shakespeare’s as long as we lived; and we certainly did come to this determination, that we never would go by choice. (“The Tempest” 234) The vow is a strong one. Hazlitt’s political frustration means no more Shakespeare, no further misleading aesthetic illusions, no more willing to be deceived. Yet what does he mean by his emphasized equivocation about not going “by choice?” This presumably refers to future obligations to attend qua theater critic. We can only speculate on Hazlitt’s resulting attitude in the audience: his professional and principled reserve, his scorn for those deluded by Prospero’s charms or Kemble’s performance, his aggressive cynicism that itself will melt the aesthetic illusion into air, the revels ended before they are begun. Hazlitt and Greenblatt have both made warranted interventions to expose the political complicity of dramatic illusion, to reveal the ways, per Said, that too many “exceptions, too many historical, ideological, and formal circumstances, implicate the text in actuality” (49). I want to highlight, however, the disengagement from aesthetic illusion— whether in Greenblatt’s critical revulsion or Hazlitt’s exasperated refusal—that seems to be a consequent, if often unnoticed, implication of this critical methodology. While this defensive dissolving of aesthetic illusion may be one of the chief functions of a politically conscious criticism, it is possible that its resulting resistance to aesthetic illusion also prevents access to the goods, even the political goods, that come from the enjoyment of art.12 In his 2001 book Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt himself seems aware of this problem and laments that his “profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing sight of—or at least failing to articulate—the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the fi rst place” (4). The book’s genealogical journey from the apparition of Hamlet’s

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father through the political and cultural confl ict over purgatory in early modern Europe perhaps unexpectedly leads Greenblatt back to that figure of revulsion—Prospero. In Greenblatt’s epilogue, he sees the epilogue to The Tempest, in which Prospero pleads that the audience’s “indulgence set me free” (Epi, 20), as an aesthetic restatement of the Catholic belief in praying for the dead (258–61). The unstated implication is that the relationship between actor and audience can approximate the benefits of the medieval doctrine and practices relating to purgatory. Drama becomes the secular inheritor of religion’s good works: medieval Catholicism’s mystical empowerment of place, the “good offices” of human prayer, the connection of generations across the grave for the sake of a soul in “despair,” and the solidarity among the living community in the mourning “piety of good friends” (261). Greenblatt’s epilogue also hearkens back to his own reluctant offering of kiddish —the Jewish prayers for the dead—for his own father (5–9), suggesting that Prospero’s art may also contribute somehow to developing and hallowing our personal and familial relationships. We can add that if Hazlitt’s own self-imposed prohibition against further Shakespearean representation had been heeded and followed, Caliban—the subject of Prospero’s mastery—would not have had opportunity for redress. This revision comes not only in Greenblatt’s discovery of The Tempest ’s brutal colonial landscape, but also in Danny Boyle’s central role for Caliban in Isles of Wonder, the opening ceremony for London’s 2012 Olympiad.13 “Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,” come the reassuring words of Caliban, a character that had once symbolized the strangeness of the world’s others to Shakespeare’s British audience. Instead, Boyle’s pageantry uses the revelry of this “monster” to invite the world into a common, convivial experience of natural wonder within Britain:14 Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again. (III.ii.137–45)

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This twenty-fi rst-century celebration does represent a compelling postcolonial vision from the vantage of the repressed that offers a welcome alternative to Prospero’s “rough magic.” Boyle does open a hopeful shared horizon of gracious departing storms to displace the wizard’s artfully produced “dread rattling thunder” (V.i.44–57). But yet, political concerns cannot be dismissed. Caliban’s beautifully dramatic account of his dream in The Tempest comes as part of a plot to bed Miranda after murdering a sleeping Prospero by knocking “a nail into his head” (III. ii.60.104–5), a context that must shadow the global glow of “Caliban’s dreams.” Such competing fears and hopes, this book contends, have led literary theorists, time and again, back to Coleridge’s words, “the willing suspension of disbelief,” for an account of a safe aesthetic middle way. Such an approach recognizes that the effects of literature seem to necessitate, on the one hand, a critique that would vanquish domineering artistic power and, on the other hand, a pursuit that would harness animating artistic power. Most recently within New Historicist criticism, the “willing suspension of disbelief” has been proposed as a resource for navigating between these two seemingly irreconcilable positions, figured as the dramatic wizard and the critical desert respectively. The fi rst chapter argues, however, that the general understanding of Coleridge’s formulation as a moderate “going along” is not adequate to that task. As a result, the second chapter investigates what Coleridge meant by the terms “faith” and “belief” embedded in the phrases the “willing suspension of disbelief” and “poetic faith.” By parsing Coleridge’s theology and epistemology, the chapter outlines a more robust response that invests the whole person in the artistic performance and thus accesses experiences otherwise unavailable. Yet this “poetic faith,” which ascends beyond the tepidity of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” leaves the reader or audience member further exposed to ideological domination. To address the resulting legitimate concern over evacuating critique, the fi nal chapter argues for an implicit “willing resumption of disbelief” in Coleridge’s thought that permits the engaged commitment of “poetic faith,” particularly with ideological or political opponents, until social or personal danger is too great and the contradiction of reality too jarring. Coleridge perhaps saw the

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inherent risk of “poetic faith” and failed to follow through with it himself in his review of Charles Maturin’s gothic play Bertram, which he reprinted in the Biographia Literaria. Nonetheless, as figures such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Wendell Berry have argued, this faithful engagement with literature remains an essential part of a life lived well and thus a vital element within a holistic and humane education.

Notes 1 For a marketing usage, see the “suspension of disbelief” advertising the “suspension technology” office chair in the Levenger catalog. For a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s use of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in the US Senate including misattributions in the media to Aristotle and baffl ing responses using Coleridge’s phrase from Senator John McCain and Governor Mitt Romney, see Safi re and the discussion below at page 55. For a representative academic usage independent of Coleridge’s literary theory, see Ron Robin’s chapter titled “The Willful Suspension of Disbelief” (188), which focuses on the disputed authenticity of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio about Guatemalan persecution of the indigenous Mayan population. 2 Exceptions are the two published conference proceedings (Literature and Belief in 1958 and Aesthetic Illusion in 1990) that use the “suspension of disbelief” as a consistent touchstone. The present study is also greatly indebted to Burwick’s monograph Illusion and the Drama (1991). For early treatments of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” see Griggs and Morrill. For more recent applications of the concept, see McCarthy’s essay on “Christabel” and Ferri’s book on fi lm theory. 3 For Abrams’s study of Coleridge as one of the “metaphysicians and bards” who “reconstitute the grounds of hope” involved in the West’s “progressive secularization,” see Natural Supernaturalism, 12–13. For Richards’s claim that “a huge ill-assorted fabric of philosophic and theological beliefs” represents “irrelevant matter” and an “obstacle” to studying Coleridge’s literary theory and psychology, see Coleridge on Imagination, 10–11. For recent challenges to the standard secularization narrative, see Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, 22–33, 211–25, and Jager 26–40. For an overview of the status of secularization theory in nineteenth-century studies, see Tomko, “Seasons of the Secular.”

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4 For Coleridge’s engagement in contemporary cultural politics involving religion, see Canuel 86–121, Mee 131–72, Ryan 133–4, Tomko, British Romanticism, 25–7, 34–5, 43–7, and Daniel E. White 119–51. For an account of how his political involvement and approach to gender shaped his theory of reading, see Newlyn 49–90. In addition to these critical studies on his relationship to various religious communities and traditions, see the overview of his religious thought provided by Perkins. 5 The term “postsecular” has become increasingly prevalent in theology, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies. In a forthcoming essay on postsecularism, Lori Branch, the editor of the book series “Religion, Literature, and Postsecular Studies,” draws a parallel with the critical engagement of postmodernism with modernism: Likewise, in passing through and moving beyond an unreflective or “presumptive” secularism—a passage never fully complete and so perpetually future—postsecular studies opens up new understandings of religion and secularism as they have been mutually constituted and as they reconfigure themselves in culture. It also opens up new understandings of the cultural forms that mediate the secularism that emerges and the religiousness that remains and reconfigures itself in modernity. A postsecular mode of inquiry would advance critical awareness of the history and ideology of the secular/religious binary—and its centrality to critical thought— and highlight the terms of conflict between secular ideologies and what they constitute and subject as religious. See Branch’s essay in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, for a useful and clear critical history and synopsis of major premises and arguments of postsecular studies. 6 Dante is a locus classicus for this debate. For example, T. S. Eliot argues that the reader must recognize the difference between “philosophical belief and poetic assent” and argues that if “you can read poetry as poetry, you will ‘believe’ in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey; that is, you suspend both belief and disbelief” (42–3). Abrams refers to the following stanza from the conclusion of the 1798 Rime of the Ancyent Marinere: He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small: For the dear God, who loveth us, He made and loveth all. (PW 1.1.165: 418.614–17) 7 For an overview of the developments in romantic era theatrical technology, see Baugh. For an account of a typical night of theatregoing in the romantic period, see Cox and Gamer vii–ix. For the

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staging of naval battles, see Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 27–8. For an account of the social, political, and artistic significance of equestrian spectacle or hippodrama, see Gamer. For Remorse’s pyrotechnics and its performance of illusion, see Burwick 267–79, including Burwick’s estimate that the successful play’s audience “probably enjoyed it for all the wrong reasons” (267). 8 In this and entries to follow, I have removed Coleridge’s deletions. For further of Coleridge’s references to drama and dreaming, see also “as in a dream, the judgment is neither beguiled, nor conscious of the fraud, but remains passive” (LitLects 1808–19 2: 277) and “It is not strictly accurate to say, that we believe our dreams to be actual while we are dreaming. We neither believe or disbelieve it—with the will the comparing power is suspended, and without the comparing power any act of Judgment, whether affi rmation or denial, is impossible” (CL 4.1010: 641). 9 While any reference to Schlegel must raise the specter of Coleridge’s unacknowledged debts raised by Fruman, Foakes and Burwick argue that Coleridge did not plagiarize this passage for his remarks on stage illusion. Foakes points out that Coleridge’s notes are watermarked 1805 (LitLects 1808–19 1: lv–lvii, 128–39), and Burwick argues that Coleridge recorded his thoughts on dramatic illusion while preparing for his fi rst lecture series of January 15 to June 8, 1808, before Schlegel’s lectures of March 31 to May 10, 1808 (Illusion and the Drama, 196). 10 For Hazlitt’s critique, fi rst published as a series of articles in The Examiner and later collected in his Political Essays under the title “Illustrations of ‘The Times’ Newspaper,” of poets being captivated by political and economic power, see his assertion that “poets turned courtiers” reinforce humanity’s natural inclination to be a “toad-eating animal” and a “worshipper of idols and a lover of kings” (143, 148–9). 11 For a more detailed description of the cultural politics of this and other Kemble productions, see Moody, “Romantic Shakespeare,” 49. 12 For a broad theoretical account of “the turn to an anti-aesthetic in theoretical writing over the past twenty years” that shares many concerns of this book but does not extensively treat New Historicism, see Isobel Armstrong’s argument in The Radical Aesthetic (2000) that “the politics of the anti-aesthetic rely on deconstructive gestures of exposure that fail to address the democratic and radical potential of aesthetic discourse” (1–2). 13 For Boyle’s ceremony, see the online clip running from 17:24 to 18:20.

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14 My suggestion is that Boyle’s inclusion of Caliban captures what Paul Gilroy, in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004) calls the “ludic, cosmopolitan energy and the democratic possibilities so evident in the postcolonial metropolis” (154). For Gilroy’s discussion of London’s own multicultural conviviality, or modes of living together with difference in Britain’s modern urban areas, see xi–xii.

CHAPTER ONE

The willing suspension of disbelief Although the “willing suspension of disbelief” has been frequently borrowed from Coleridge to address problems in literary theory, such appropriations generally do not seek either to defi ne or to realize literature’s purpose in human life. That, instead, would be the type of inquiry pursued by Socrates outside the walls of Athens in Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue that ultimately sees beautiful rhetoric leading to a fulfi lling, god-like vision of Beauty itself, of “whole, simple, unchanging, and blessed visions” and insight into “Being, the Being that truly is” (31, 28; 250c, 247d). Rather than fostering fulfillment, the “willing suspension of disbelief” is focused on mitigating two fears, both derived from what Plato called the writer’s art of psychagogia, or the guiding of souls (45, 261a). As Stephen Scully notes, this Greek term summons an image of the artist as necromancer, bearing negative connotations of a Prospero-like figure’s “conjuring up of souls from the underworld” or influencing through “witchcraft or enchantment” (45 n. 106). This fear of the magi-artist, who can overpower an individual’s reason and will in order to undermine or enforce social dictates, has persisted in critical models. So too, however, has another, opposite fear: the dread of a life without any such magical “guidance.” Plato argues that an uninspired soul will be subject to a safe but “slavish economizing” that will lead to roaming futilely and infertilely “for 9,000 years around the earth and beneath it, mindlessly” (39; 256e–257a). In other words, avoiding or banishing

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literature’s wondrous effects would lead to a life devoid of affect and insight. In Abolition of Man (1943), C. S. Lewis has argued that such guardedness has become so prevalent that the “modern educator” was not needed “to cut down jungles” for the wild youth “but to irrigate deserts” for the barrenly cynical and skeptically disenchanted reader (13–14). These two fears are interrelated as avoiding one seems to result in the other. This chapter begins amid the culture wars of the romantic era with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s debunking of literary power in “Ozymandias” and outlines how this justifiable resistance to the aesthetic informs the “critical vantage” of Jerome McGann’s early New Historicist criticism and Terry Eagleton’s political criticism. Yet both these critics also recognize that this disenchanting methodology leads to the desert and both seek “guidance” from literature nevertheless. The recent return to the “willing suspension of disbelief” by New Historicist critics such as Catherine Gallagher seems to represent an attempted middle way that charts a course between the feared results from both aesthetic absorption under the wizard and the critical vantage of the desert. Ultimately, however, I will argue that even in Gallagher’s compelling construal, the “willing suspension of disbelief” inadequately addresses this fundamental dilemma in literary theory and cannot ultimately lead readers to the human goods for which literature provides hope.

Into the desert: The critical vantage and the Wizard of Ozymandias When Prospero dissolves his masque in The Tempest, he abruptly shuts down a captivating literary moment and subsequently steps back to offer an apologetic, explanatory theory about the illusory nature of dramatic art. While these reflections are farreaching, speculating about the reality of the world and life itself, Shakespeare’s closing exploration of aesthetic illusion may not be the most radical example of a work of great literary power voicing concern about literature’s great power. While Shakespeare wrote in the wake of the English Reformation, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley promoted revolutionary reform in his own corrupt, undemocratic nineteenth-century England in the turbulent times

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following the French Revolution.1 Against his message of hopeful change stood a reactionary power structure, which was instituted by George III and later maintained by the Prince Regent in fear of Revolutionary chaos and Napoleonic might. Even after Napoleon fell at Waterloo in 1815, government officials, such as Lord Chancellor Eldon, Viscount Castlereagh, and Viscount Sidmouth (the foreign and home secretaries respectively under the intransigent prime minister Lord Liverpool), resisted any moves toward reforming parliament, extending voting rights, or emancipating those outside the Anglican establishment from longstanding forms of religious discrimination. Shelley accordingly portrayed them as representatives of the deeper human ills of murder, hypocrisy, and fraud in his 1819 poem “The Mask of Anarchy,” which reacted to the government’s deployment of the military strength it had shown under the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo against peaceful protesters at the so-called Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. Leigh Hunt, who had published his journal The Examiner from a jail cell following a politically motivated conviction for libel, balked at printing “The Mask of Anarchy,” demonstrating how charged the written word had become in what Jeffrey N. Cox has called the romantic “culture wars” (Poetry and Politics 13). In this ideological fray, the conservative press contended that even the most reasonable and limited reforms should be suppressed, lest they occasion a British version of the French Terror. Kevin Gilmartin has described this intense, monitory reaction to the Revolution as an “ideological mobilization” that had “profound consequences for literature and the arts as well as the press and public opinion” (“Counter-Revolutionary Culture” 129). The amplified anxiety within the counter-revolutionary campaign received satiric representation in George Cruikshank’s “A Radical Reformer, i.e. A Neck or Nothing Man!” (Figure 1.1), which animated a monstrous French guillotine rampaging through English streets after “the Heads of the Nation,” namely Eldon, Castlereagh, an unnamed bishop, and the Prince Regent who escapes from the frame and the flame. It would be easy to mistake this elaborately gruesome work as itself a reactionary image that warns Britons against the bloody consequences of fl irting with French Republicanism. The guillotine’s “I’m a coming! I’m a coming” hardly seems a hopeful democratic anthem. As Robert

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FIGURE 1.1 George Cruikshank, “A Radical Reformer,—(i.e.) A Neck or Nothing Man! Dedicated to the Heads of the Nation.” London: Thomas Tegg, 1819. © Trustees of the British Museum.

L. Patten argues in George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art (1992), however, Cruikshank’s images “often point overtly to one reading while conveying another” (xiii). Although Cruikshank was no clear political partisan, he was in these years “involved in popular Radical causes and associated with printers, publishers, and a Radical underworld” and was waging “propaganda wars” for his friend and “political mentor,” the radical publisher William Hone (Patten 126, 121, 151). In 1820, George IV would even offer to buy Cruikshank’s silence, an offer, like that made to Hunt in 1812, did little to silence his critiques. 2 Given Cruikshank’s commitment to some form of radical reform, how should this complex cartoon of a “radical reformer” be read? On one account, Cruikshank could be representing popular violence as a bargaining chip, a veiled threat: promote reforms benefitting England’s oppressed or else England’s oppressed will, à la française, head for England’s “Heads presently.” Even Shelley’s call to nonviolent civil disobedience in “Mask of Anarchy” subtly invokes this monition by calling on the “many” to “rise like lions

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after slumber” against the “few,” lines recently invoked by the Occupy movement on behalf of the 99 percent. Patten has indeed located the thematic warning that “government oppression could lead to revolution” in Cruikshank’s work of this period (157). 3 There does, however, seem to be yet another level, a metalevel, of cultural commentary in the graphic. Cruikshank’s image of the sanscullote executioner goes well beyond suggestion to the point of hyperbole. Its size dominates the picture’s frame. The sanguinary red of its liberty cap is only outdone by angry red flames and ubiquitous drips of blood. Its presence sends everything into indistinct confusion, smearing out any sense of place, time, order, propriety, community, or context in the picture. Nothing besides remains but the self-preserving panic of the fleeing elite and the frightful fiend they imagine to be close behind. Cruikshank seems to have raised the French monster as an ironic representation of the inflated fear and dread that circulated throughout British counter-revolutionary culture. Cruikshank gives life to the looming Gallic monster, but this “guillotine of the mind” exposes the ruling class’s narrowed imaginary of overwrought gore and chaos. Revealing this extremism thus takes the life out of counterrevolutionary propaganda. The Guillotine rises as a monument of reactionary mobilization, but likewise shows why it warrants circumspection like one of the Wizard of Oz’s initially fierce but ultimately phony facades, particularly the “enormous Head” that had left Dorothy full of “wonder and fear,” though with more courage than Cruikshank granted to the English elite (127; Figure 1.2). This undercutting of monuments is a consistent trope within Cruikshank’s work and found focused expression in his treatments of Hyde Park’s enormous naked statue of “Achilles.” After its 1822 installation as a tribute to the Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon, its strategically placed leaf raised a controversy over public decency, but it should also raise the question of why the Greek hero was nude in the fi rst place. In the Illiad, the armor of Achilles gets almost as much attention as his rage. He is without it only at one point—when it has been borrowed by and then stripped from Patroclus. A vengeful Achilles cannot rejoin the battle to reclaim the corpse of his fallen friend while he awaits newly fashioned gear from the gods, so he ascends the ramparts to let the Trojans know of his imminent return:

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FIGURE 1.2 W.W. Denslow, “The eyes looked at her thoughtfully.” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Chicago and New York: George M. Hill, 1900. Reproduced courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.

. . . and so, thus standing there, He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout, Added a dreadful cry; and there arose Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.. . . Thrice o’er the trench divine Achilles shouted; And thrice the Trojans and their great allies Rolled back; and twelve of all their noblest men Then perished, crushed by their own arms and chariots. (8–9)4 This is psychological warfare at its most potent, and the passage captures Achilles in his most monumental and most Ozymandian moment. Hyde Park’s elevated, naked Achilles would thus be a

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FIGURE 1.3 George Cruikshank, “Monstrosities of 1822.” Cruikshankiana. London: McLean, 1835. Reproduced courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library, Special Collections.

warning symbol of just retribution and incontestable power. Yet Cruikshank lampoons the classical presumptions and undercuts the martial nobility of the massive statement in stone. In his treatment, the monument is another “monstrosity” akin to the preening ornamentalism of the Regency patrician class, who step obliviously in the shadow of their leader (Figure 1.3). Another 1822 cartoon, “Backside & front view of the Ladies Fancy Man, Paddy Carey O’Killus,” is almost too replete to summarize (Figure 1.4). The real Wellington stands below in impotent admiration, while a flurry of jokes, questions, and ejaculations from titillated women and confused children distracts from any intended sense of might, majesty, shock, or awe. Whether through blatant ridicule or ironic reversal, Cruikshank’s works share the common project of neutralizing the aesthetic power and ideological sway of counterrevolutionary monument-making.5 For an oppositional reformist, this iconoclastic approach was urgent as the British nineteenth century developed into an age of monumentalization, primarily for lauding Admiral Horatio Nelson

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FIGURE 1.4 George Cruikshank, “Backside & front view of the Ladies Fancy Man, Paddy Carey O’Killus.” London, 1822. © Trustees of the British Museum.

or Wellington, those national heroes who turned back Napoleon in 1805 and 1815. While London’s Trafalgar Square with its towering Nelson’s column and the immortalization of Wellington with a triumphal arch were realized in the Victorian period, others popped up immediately in the romantic.6 Completed in 1806, a Glasgow column in honor of Nelson predated a similar construction near Portsmouth by one year, his Dublin pillar by two. Throughout the nation, funereal tributes to all of the captains of Trafalgar radiated out from Nelson’s grand tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral. The call for a national monument commemorating Waterloo emerged instantly, though its completion would be delayed greatly. The first monument to Wellington himself sprang up in Somerset in 1817, another Orientalist obelisk. The Examiner reported on this cultural development that explicitly brought together art and politics. In 1811, the journal lamented the lachrymose tribute paid to Nelson at Guildhall, eschewing a review because the monument was “so defective, that the reader’s time must not be wasted in reading

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what would consist altogether of censure” (“New Monument” 284). This preventative critical technique is significant as it does not allow the reader an encounter with the shape, size, and effects of the monument, not even one that would be second-hand and censorious. Nevertheless more monuments were to come and, after 1815, the government’s bungling of the commissioning of the Waterloo national monument was a recurrent theme for the journal.7 For The Examiner, the disconnect between the “men in public life” and the nation’s “genius and ingenuity” seemed to speak to deeper problematic issues “in the present situation of the country” (“To the Editor” 108). Perhaps more significantly, The Examiner honed in on the literary parallel to this momumentalizing trend. In 1816, Hunt aggressively reviewed the Waterloo sonnets William Wordsworth published in the Champion. He singled out the sonnet “Inscription for a National monument, in Commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo” with the razing comment that it had “nothing particular in it as to poetry” (58). Here again, Hunt denies the aesthetic access that even a negative review would provide. This preclusion, which would shield his readers from the work’s intended wonderment, seems his most crucial tactic as a critic. Wordsworth was not alone in attempting to do in print what others were trying in stone. Robert Southey erected his two-volume Life of Nelson in 1813, the year he received the laureate from the Prince Regent. In 1816, he stood before readers a Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, a massive work that begins as a Spenserian travelogue only to open up into an imperial prophecy that celebrates Wellington’s pivotal role in salvation history. Its eschatological message opposes reform with a monumental poetic tribute to Wellington and his warriors that echoes the Ozymandian claim to a “glory that shall last from age to age!” (4.25). Southey’s Life of Nelson explicitly apotheosizes its anti-Napoleonic hero in order to save the age. He quotes the parliamentarian, poet, and journalist George Canning’s epitaphic “Ulm and Trafalgar” as an epigraph to show that not even the limits of mortality could deter Nelson’s great task: Bursting thro’ the gloom With radiant glory from thy trophied tomb, The sacred splendour of thy deathless name

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Shall grace and guard thy Country’s martial fame. Far-seen shall blaze the unextinguish’d ray A mighty beacon, lighting Glory’s way; With living lustre this proud Land adorn, And shine and save, thro’ ages yet unborn. (iii) Remembering the memorial tomb allows the military hero’s spirit to hold sway in the present and future. The summoning continues as an imposing engraving of Nelson’s visage accompanies Canning’s words (Figure 1.5). The leader once again seems to be present, glaring beyond the confi nes of the book with a judging stare, ready to command again. These monuments all attempt to assert looming control over current politics by revitalizing the honorable dead or by elevating a living hero into an unquestionable pantheon.

FIGURE 1.5 Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1813. Reproduced courtesy of Princeton University Library.

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“Ozymandias,” one of Shelley’s most famous sonnets, continued the project of Hunt and Cruikshank and likewise sought to defuse the anxious pressures and fear-mongering monuments that pervaded what Gilmartin calls romantic-era “print culture” and “public expression” around the time of Peterloo (“CounterRevolutionary Culture” 129–30).8 Shelley’s work fi rst appeared in The Examiner of January 1818: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . .Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”—(109–10) In this account of a traveler, who is a story-teller himself, we learn the fate of some statue of some forgotten tyrant named Ozymandias. The statue presumably had been part of an earlier “ideological mobilization” that kept this king in power and prevented the type of political progress Shelley desired. This statue, however, is ruined; its brag ironized, undermining not only the power of the unknown Ozymandias but any like-minded rulers with likeminded messages. In The Tempest, Ferdinand had compliantly marveled at Prospero’s play as “a most majestic vision” and paid homage to his “wondered father,” his exiled uncle Prospero who will soon reclaim the title from Ferdinand’s actual father (IV.i.118, 123). Ferdinand’s passivity demonstrates the desired ideological function of the wizard’s art. It generates a sense of beholden captivation to power and majesty, and it is this subtle and pleasing domination that Shelley fractures by fracturing the statue of “Ozymandias.” The unjust kings are now the “mighty” ones in despair because their imperial works, their armies and

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palaces, are similarly fragile. Their dejection is also because those artistic “works,” those media messages akin to the demonization of radical reformers, are now ruined. The minions of Ozymandias have been freed from the propaganda that supported him and enchained them. So too has the traveler, the poet who hears his story, and Shelley’s readers who overhear it too. This emancipating parable could be seen as the poetic practice of Shelley’s confident theoretical assertion from his famous essay “A Defence of Poetry” that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” who cast a progressive future despite being neglected by their myopic contemporaries (535). Yet, far from the emphasis on the persistence of poetry articulated in the canonical essay, the poem “Ozymandias” offers a preemptive literary theory—one that defuses a potent aesthetic encounter before its effects can take hold—through its own dramatic presentation of a “statue in a sonnet” that parallels Shakespeare’s “mask in a drama.” Like Prospero’s shattered play, Hunt’s rebuffi ng reviews, or Cruikshank’s palliative parody, this internal theory offers the wreckage of an artwork as liberation, a necessary renunciation of the aesthetic like Hazlitt’s that derives from a sense of revulsion like Greenblatt’s and aborts monumental power with a stance like Hunt’s. In the sonnet, the king’s monument and its inscription are rendered “lifeless things”—unanimated, literally sapped of their anima or life-giving soul or spirit. This is precisely the opposite of Prospero’s animating stagecraft that summons “Spirits” to “enact” his “present fancies” (IV.i.121–2). Shelley’s literary theory emphasizes the political and ethical need to exorcize those spirits from public art. The neutralizing literary theory within “Ozymandias” identifies the reanimating, enthroning ideology of such romantic literary monuments and then offers a way of negating their effects. Two quatrains, which open the sonnet, calmly sift the feckless remains of the king’s statue and make the political problem of Ozymandian art seem like a past problem, a settled scene from history. The sonnet’s volta, however, unsettles this serenity and shows Shelley’s concerns for the preeminent ability of literature such as Wordsworth’s inscription to re-assert a power whose time had seemed to be past. In the ninth line, the sense of antiquated obsolescence suddenly changes when “words appear.” Their legibility itself must be meaningful, since the inscription should have naturally been erased

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by what Wordsworth would call the “unimaginable touch of time” in his sonnet on “Mutability” in the 1822 Ecclesiastical Sketches (3.34.14). The words’ miraculous persistence, overcoming age and erosion, suggests that Shelley views the literary as somehow even more potent, more enduring, and thus more threatening than the shambolic statuary. When the vocal letters sound again amid the silent heap, the poem’s tone worryingly shifts and the tense of the traveler’s tale rushes into the present. Ozymandias seems to have come alive again. The previously apostrophized ruin now speaks back to the poet: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Wordsworth described a similar moment of haunting return in his discussion of epitaphs with fi rst-person engravings that “personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tomb-stone” (“Essays upon Epitaphs” 60). For Wordsworth, it is a moment of “shadowy interposition,” but is ultimately only a “fiction” in which the dead spirit seems to rejoin the living. Whereas for Wordsworth this lyric simulation produces a “tranquilising” effect, the reanimating return of Ozymandias seems more real and thus more troubling (60). The memorable words recall a ghostly ruler from his “trophied tomb” and foretell the type of reactionary political effects conjured in Canning’s epigraph, which brings Nelson back to his contemporaries, or Southey’s prophecy, which sustains Wellington’s spirit into the future. Unlike these counter-revolutionary writers, however, Shelley launches a re-volta, a second turn in the sonnet: “Nothing beside remains.” Before Ozymandias is able to impose his “majestic vision” on those “ages yet unborn,” the ghost’s message is interrupted abruptly, authoritatively, and with startling concision following the extended syntax of the rest of the poem. Shelley mandates that Ozymandias will remain an impotent fantasy, unable truly to “burst” into history like the demotic “phantom” does in his other politically minded sonnet of this period, “England in 1819.”9 Shakespeare had allowed for a transition of “strange, hollow, and confused noise” until Prospero shouts “Avoid” or “a-void”— literally sending the acting spirits into nothingness (IV.i.138, 141). Ozymandias’s spirit vanishes completely, instantaneously, as a purely fictive “nothing” of a momentarily deluded mind. The inscription’s power is negated. The void that is then left comes as a relief. The poem closes in the desert, but this is a quietly joyful

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exodus from pharaonic monuments, gods, noise, and clamor: “Nothing besides remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” This concluding deliverance is wonderfully barren, starkly empowering. Ozymandias’s might has deserted him in this desert setting. The world has been purged of his domination, and the reader has been purged of the fear, the trembling, the obedience. Gone too is the trepidation before Cruikshank’s guillotine, the wonder before Wellington’s pyramidal memorials, Dorothy’s intimidation before the Wizard, and the admonishment felt under Nelson’s stare. “Nothing beside remains”—Shelley has reduced the aesthetic power of Ozymandias to nothingness, and the resulting annihilation of cultural power has been a voiding liberation. This blanched consummation represents an unlikely literary theory to emerge from within a sonnet: an artistic argument for dis-empowering art; but, I would argue, it makes the Huntian intervention of re-moving monumental power and does so to combat a dynamic of power that Shelley saw moving across history and nations, from the deserts of Egypt to the mysterious ways of central London. “Ozymandias” could be seen as a particularly puritanical moment or a strategically oppositional aspect of Shelley’s overall approach to literature, which goes well beyond this guarded, neutralizing approach in the theory of “Defence of Poetry” and in the practice of his other works. The paradox of the artistic disarmament of art in Cruikshank and Shelley could be resolved by seeing their skepticism as confi ned to counter-revolutionary propaganda—a way of reading Southey, but not Keats. For Shelley’s fellow “young poet,” Adonais bestows beyond the tomb an inspiring “echo and a light unto eternity” (1.9). While Shelley remained committed to leaving thrones vacated, he certainly did not remain in the void, filling the “Oceans and the Desarts and the Abysses” (4.335) with lush landscapes, laughing music, and aesthetic abundance in act IV of Prometheus Unbound. Yet if Shelley felt himself and his circle capable of making art that did not perpetuate the will to dominate that characterizes Ozymandian propaganda, critics such as Jerome McGann have critiqued any exceptionalism for romantic liberatory poetics. Developing a line of thinking from Marx and Engel’s 1845–7 German Ideology, McGann argues in The Romantic Ideology (1983) that the transcendental strain of romantic literature

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like Shelley’s simply puts into place a new ideological structure to replace the old. When Shelley’s words appear, they are all the more captivating because they do not openly proclaim the bold bravado of Ozymandias, but rather claim to rise above the messy fray of banal realpolitik and partisan bickering to offer a quasi-divine view of how to re-order society. “The poetry of Romanticism,” McGann asserts, “is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby the actual human issues with which poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities” (1). The threat is two-fold: either romantics channel real dissent into a consoling aesthetic realm that ultimately proves irrelevant or it impresses itself into the hearts and minds of individuals and society at large to craft a new, subtler cultural power through a “secret ministry.”10 In either case, it remains an ideology, a new monument that needs to be shattered and whose spirit must be silenced in the name of freedom. Indeed, McGann offers Coleridge, with his discussions of “belief” and “enthusiasm” in particular, as the most influential proponent of this ensnaring ideology, whose deplorably “false consciousness” must be revealed as a “body of illusions” (5). Subsequently, McGann takes critics to task for not leading the exodus to the desert as an “avenue of escape from certain illusions” (13) but instead remaining in “uncritical” (1) thrall before the “mighty beacon” of romanticism, echoing infi nitely its song of its self, eternally repeating its “I am Ozymandias” from generation to generation. It must be emphasized that the romantics are not alone to blame for this romantic ideology. McGann sees the same dynamic involved in “all inherited works of literature” (14) and identifies romantic studies as only one “example” or “case study, of how literary criticism is involved with ideology” (x). The need for maintaining the defensive hermeneutic against Ozymandian art is thus not simply a problem presented by the romantic spirit of the age, but rather a central charge for literary theory and a responsibility of every literary critic. Perhaps no contemporary work has been more influential in arguing for a broadly applicable form of such critical iconoclasm than Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which alerted a generation of undergraduates to the difficult methodological and political issues involved in how and why to study literature. Eagleton cautions against the false security provided by easy divisions between mere propaganda

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and enlightened high art, or between the writings and ideologies of reactionaries such as Southey and progressives such as Shelley. Literary Theory would echo Shelley’s sense that the bombastic tribute to the “King of Kings” is an illusion whose grandeur must be undermined and dominion removed. Eagleton’s book rigorously contends that that it is impossible to identify “real literature” apart from interested and shifting social and political constructions of what does and does not count as literature. Shelley’s fantastic Promethean revelry would be no exception. Nor is there a “pure” mode of approaching literature that would elevate us above the fray. Like McGann, Eagleton will not remove a paradox that governs what he called the “illusion” of the literary: The fi nal logical move in a process which began by recognizing that literature is an illusion is to recognize that literary theory is an illusion too. . . . It is an illusion fi rst in the sense that literary theory . . . is really no more than a branch of social ideologies . . . and secondly in the sense that the one hope it has of distinguishing itself—clinging to an object named literature—is misplaced. (204) The argument is powerful and stringent: any approach to literature must recognize its own investment in social frameworks and political agendas, or what Eagleton calls “competing ideological strategies” (199). No reading of literature is pure, detached, disinterested, simply aesthetic; but rather, as Eagleton claims following the French postmodern theorist Michel Foucault, “critical discourse is power” (203). The same de-animating critical gaze that was turned against the re-animating inscription for Ozymandias or the re-vitalizing epigraph for Nelson also must be turned toward all literature and art as well as all approaches to literature and art. Eagleton thus intones that his “book is less an introduction than an obituary, and that we have ended by burying the object we sought to unearth” (204). The role of the literary critic is to ensure that threatening spirits remain in their tombs and that the reader remains free in the desert. In our age of advertising and media saturation, such a critical wariness almost requires no justification. Literary studies and literature itself are both motivated and ideological. In this account, they differ in degree, not kind, from advertising in their pervasive

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attempts to persuade all who will listen, by any means available, to buy. In response to the enthralled Dorothy’s desperate petition to return to Kansas, the looming head of Oz demanded its own favor with unvarnished justification: “In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets” (128). The power dynamic involving the illusory wizard is comparable to the conscious or unconscious selling of a product, a political program, a worldview, or an approach to literature. “From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Norman N. Holland,” writes Eagleton, “literary theory has been indissociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values” (194). One of Eagleton’s key insights, developed in greater length in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), is that literature’s best selling point—delivered with poetic or academic sophistication—is that it is not out to sell anything. There is thus another liberation needed when so many “words appear,” another avenue of escape into the silence of the desert, a preclusive exorcism for those selling spirits present in everything, as Eagleton says, “from Moby Dick to The Muppet Show” (207). Eagleton therefore calls for an approach to literature that will emancipate from messages of power in any context. He calls this “political criticism” or rhetorical criticism (205–6). He outlines this approach through an analogy: Reading a zoology textbook to fi nd out about giraffes is part of studying zoology, but reading it to see how its discourse is structured and organized, and examining what kind of effects these forms and devices produce in particular readers in actual situations, is a different kind of project. (205) This latter project is Eagleton’s and, he argues, should be that of literary studies. But what does this mean? What does it mean to study “the way discourses are constructed in order to achieve certain effects”? The key component is stepping out of the statue’s shadow and ceasing to receive its message. It is necessary to go behind the scenes, to see how aesthetic power is generated: why an artwork emerged at a particular time for a particular purpose, why it was made by a particular individual to serve a particular social purpose, how it is formed to accomplish that task. The most concise illustration may again be from The Wizard of Oz. Unlike the inhabitants of the Emerald City, Dorothy sees how he generates

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FIGURE 1.6 W. W. Denslow, “Exactly so! I am a humbug.” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Chicago and New York: George M. Hill, 1900. Reproduced courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.

the stage “effects”—the ball of fi re, the beautiful lady, the massive head, the tinted glasses—that elevate him to power in this fantastic otherworld. Dorothy and the readers debunk his illusions and see him for what he is—a charlatan, an impotent American salesman; and she must seek other resources to get home (Figure 1.6). Through such circumspection, the illusion will be broken, and so too will the artist’s power. Whether from the desert or from the wings, the artwork loses its awe and enthrallment, loses its omnipotence. Belief cannot be demanded backstage. As The Examiner recognized with the Nelson memorial and Wordsworth’s verses to Wellington, the “despair” Ozymandias seeks cannot be generated if spectators do not “look on” but rather see through his works.

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This theoretical recommendation to disrupt the ideological power of an artwork by taking ourselves out of the role of enthralled audience member can be seen in the scholarly practice of McGann, who emphasizes the crucial role of perspective: “In my view ideology will necessarily be seen as false consciousness when observed from a critical vantage” (12). What are the characteristics of this “critical vantage”? Foremost, it does not proceed from “within the ideology,” a limited and ultimately futile position that McGann ascribes to Coleridge (12). Getting outside the ideology also entails getting outside of what McGann calls an “experiential and aesthetic level of understanding” (13). In other words, the “critical vantage” provides the required self-conscious distance and detachment from the receptive experience of an artwork that an audience member, reader, or viewer has traditionally assumed. This “vantage from without” dissolves domination by changing the fundamental relationship with the artwork. The audience no longer participates qua audience, and that lack of participation precludes collaboration or co-optation. If the aesthetic experience of Shelley’s or Southey’s poetry transmits ideology, escaping aesthetic experience will end or bypass subjection to such captivating wizardry. This shift makes both the theory of Eagleton and the practice of McGann a fundamentally different kind of project. The ideological liberation from illusions (the “why” of reading literature) goes hand in hand with this critical reorientation that circumvents aesthetic experience (the “how” of reading literature). The temptation for many, at this point, might be to dismiss this “critical vantage” as politicizing literature or ruining the classics for partisan ends. Yet McGann, Eagleton, and critics sharing their approach in Marxist and New Historicist studies offer valuable and important insights that are perilously ignored. A formation in this mode of reading could foster what McGann terms a “self-conscious and critical” understanding that could provide immunity not only from the ideology of high literature but from the magical manipulations of the marketplace that now contend for every nanosecond of our attention (13). Such protective intellectual habits are needed for survival and sanity in the face of what Thomas Frank has termed the “culture trust,” the adaptive form of economic power that corporate capital has assumed in the twentieth century, a transformation only made more efficiently dazzling in the twenty-fi rst century by big data and digitalization

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(34). In Commodify your Dissent (1997), Frank identified the ways that 1950s conformity shed its Ozymandian “voice of oppressive order” to coalesce with the neoromantic antinomian and uninhibited countercultural protests of the 1960s into the “official aesthetic of consumer society” (33). Frank exposes the branding of the Beats, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan to stimulate our desires for and lower our defenses against acquisitive impulses for everything from fast food to pick-up trucks. When “Information Age business theory” (35) calls forth consumerism with the literature and song of revolution and rebellion, we need the vaccine provided by a similarly keen and adaptive critical consciousness to preserve our humanity. Yet is undermining the co-opting power of literature through a liberating critical vantage the ultimate end of studying literature?11 In deflecting literature’s power and defusing its effects, the defensive skepticism of Eagleton, McGann, and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” represents a necessary but not sufficient goal for literary study and artistic encounters. If taken for the whole, it would be reductive. For why, as Greenblatt writes of literary power, would anyone continue to read if this were the case? Why not miss the play entirely and rid ourselves of the need to worry about sneaking behind the scenes to avoid aesthetic domination? Why not just walk past the museum unalarmed or put an end to statue-making altogether? There would seem to be at least two goods for human life that this approach would not only neglect, but potentially disallow. The fi rst concerns the human person and the prospect for transformation that seems to be at the heart of the hope that many locate in literature and art. The critical vantage provides no place for, or training in, receptivity and thus no opportunity for “transformative” development. In Why Read? (2004), Mark Edmundson answers his own titular question by arguing that in his teaching experience only the genius and power of great literature is sufficient to shake students sired by the Culture Trust into a realization of what their “vital options” for living well might be (2). In his account, the critical vantage levels these other voices from the past and present, stranding students amid the prevalent forces of distraction and exploitation. For Edmundson, the teaching of literature should open up vibrant alternative modes of living that may provide more sustainable forms of resistance. I am not claiming that Edmundson’s position is ultimately right or ideologically neutral. Rather I am simply

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pointing out that the critical vantage makes a preemptive sacrifice of this potential source of positive transformation from literature. What might that possibility entail? J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) may seem an unlikely place to turn to exemplify “vital options” for contemporary readers, but the mythographic series of quests depends, at its start, upon whether imaginative literature and song can break through a resolutely and anxiously constrained middle-class horizon of expectations. Consider The Hobbit (1937), which begins, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (3). Although otherworldly, Tolkien made Bilbo Baggins to reflect his readership. He is reasonably well-off, comfortably ensconced in a bachelor’s life within a safe, suburban, albeit underground home in a nice neighborhood. He is cautiously skeptical of strangers and books, wary of being taken in. His small size corresponds with his small ambitions and desires. Yet his adventures, in which he does untold good for Middle-Earth and realizes unforeseen Tookish potential within himself, depend upon listening to a Wizard, as Matthew T. Dickerson has written, on following Gandalf. But how could anyone, with hairy feet or otherwise, be animated by a Wizard’s effects, or believe in any literary illusion again, after Eagleton’s obituary? Instead, left to his own devices after the death of literature, Bilbo’s “avenue of escape” from the wizard’s words seems clear—a path deeper into his hole, into a life of what Tom Shippey has characterized as a recognizably twentieth-century form of bourgeois, English cul-de-sac subjectivity (5–11). It is an isolated existence, of nervous possession without enjoyment and respectability without any expectation of love or meaningful social connections. Had Bilbo maintained his original reservations, had he not listened to the Wizard’s words, had he not found something “woke up inside him” by the romantic “deep-throated singing of the dwarves” (16, 14), he would not have gone off to a life of burglary with the Dwarves. “In a hole in the ground there stayed a hobbit.” What was this vital option? His isolation would probably have continued—it is hard to see him forming deeper friendships in the Shire, like those he forged with the Elves and the dwarves along the Great Road. He would not have learned other languages and songs either. It is hard to see him ever getting married or adopting, raising, and effectively parenting his nephew Frodo; or spending his wealth on much of anything. He would not have a

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map beyond the Shire’s Country Round or a history for those lands and peoples. He probably would have burrowed a bit more deeply into Bag End, his suburban hillside, hallowing out windowless room after room where he could ensure being alone, undisturbed except for occasionally “very uncomfortable dreams” (26), seeking quiet and comfort, lest the wizard come again. He would have written nothing, died after a while, had his home repossessed by his distant relatives. His memory would be quickly forgotten. It is an existence that would be simple, commonplace, and horrifying. The life of a ring-less Gollum. Without Wizardry or song, a way out of the black sack of Bag End for the bourgeois Bilbo seems unimaginable. Bilbo’s staid self-sufficiency points to what may be called the extro-spective or outward-looking goods that literature and art may nurture and that may also be unavailable from the critical vantage. Consider the concluding image of “Ozymandias.” “Nothing besides remains.” Nothing—the reader is left as an individual in a desert. There is no cultivated nature, no community, and in the deepest sense, no culture.12 While it is a moment of liberation, this dis-culturation is a drastic emancipation where truly “nothing” remains—no communal life and no ecological connections. Yet Nicholas Boyle has argued in Sacred and Secular Scriptures (2005) that art and literature are themselves repeated “gestures of hope and supplication for the reconciliation that alone they cannot effectuate” (169); incarnated desires for profound connections with the world, with human beings, and with God; articulations against the countervailing evidence of history and experience for the possibility of irenic communion (183–6). Yet if these connections beyond the desert of “nothing” are a result of aesthetic power, would not this require making ourselves subject to literature’s “effects,” as Shelley attempts in the utopian vision of Prometheus Unbound? But if we have disbelieved in literature as an “illusion,” how could we go back to believing again? Having broken the propaganda machine of the Wizard of Oz, is it possible to be enchanted by the images of the Wizard of Ozymandias? The critical vantage, in its justified anxiety over ideological captivity, would seem to prohibit making exception for such constructive cultural visions that might, in the words of the poet, writer, and agricultural activist Wendell Berry, “stick things together so that they stay stuck” (Life is a Miracle

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150). For Berry, “farms, families, and communities” are “forms of art” that are nurtured in language and that are made “either well or poorly” (Life is a Miracle 150). At this point, I am not invoking the conversionary power of Edmundson, the transcendent hope of Boyle, or the constitutive culture-making of Berry as simple, ready alternatives to the critical vantage that vacate any ideological concerns. Rather, I offer them merely as possibilities for desirable goods emerging from literary power that are necessarily set aside when literary power is critically undermined, albeit for justifiable reasons. Further, the desire and felt need for these effects are already present within the writing of Eagleton and McGann, not to mention Shelley. In other words, calls for approaches to literature and art that convey some type of aesthetic experience and that deploy some sort of aesthetic power to accomplish some sort of humanistic good are not simply coming from critics of the critical vantage or from critiques of critique.13 The need for transformative and annealing aesthetic power appears within the seminal writing of Eagleton on “political criticism” and the foundational New Historicist intervention of McGann. In Literary Theory: An Introduction, what will become a more pressing concern for Eagleton in his later works, is only briefly expressed. Nevertheless, near the end of the book he admits the uses of “pleasure, enjoyment,” and “the potentially transformative effects of discourse” (212). As examples he cites fostering “linguistic potential” among disadvantaged children, “utopian” imaginative uses of literature that would forecast a better society, and the cultivation of literary style among British working-class writers. These all seem laudable goals, but it is unclear how these effects, which derive from aesthetic experience, can with consistency be fostered or sustained under Eagleton’s methodology, which strategically neutralizes that experience. In other words, these socially and personally constructive benefits seem to suggest different ends for why to read literature than those of “rhetorical criticism,” but these additional justifications are jeopardized by the book’s dominant message about how to read literature from a critical vantage. The same difficulty—maintaining aesthetic effects in the face of a critical methodology designed to circumvent those effects— also arises more subtly but not less significantly in The Romantic Ideology. McGann hammers against the pronounced tendency

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among romanticists to be absorbed by their subject, to read the romantics on the romantics’ own terms, and to conflate the poets’ voices, times, and struggles with their own. His intervention, therefore, sought to shock critics out of this continuity in order to distinguish the past from the present so that it might be the past qua past, not a projected re-vision of our own contemporary concerns. This may make for a painful separation as it entails a newly introduced critical disjunction that will necessarily be alienating. Yet McGann is actually clear that this alienation is not an end of itself, but only an initial step. The past, and particularly the romantic poetic past, is isolated so that it may be understood apart from the unexamined ideologies of our own time and thus re-emerge on its own terms in order to challenge our current assumptions. McGann explicitly states this as the second benefit of the critical vantage when describing how the “abstractions and ideologies of the present are laid open to critique from another human world” (13). Historicizing critical alienation thus aims not to be a killing force, but rather to enable a type of resurrection, or at least a conjuring of the dead from this “otherworld” of history. The vision is secular, so this is not a ghastly King Hamlet returned from purgatory to indict Claudius’s Denmark and to steel his son. Yet this method presents a parallel return from the cultural past that can critique the present state and bear up those who can now remember its message. A return from another world—this explicit description of the second stage of McGann’s critical method fi nds implicit expression in his book’s governing comparison to the most well-known return from the tomb in romantic history and hagiography. McGann places readers among Shelley’s mourning friends who witnessed the survival of the poet’s heart amid the flames of his littoral cremation: “Like Trelawney at the cremation of Shelley, we shall reach for the unconsumed heart of the poem only if we are prepared to suffer a genuine change through its possession” (13). McGann so identified with Trelawney’s description of unaccountably but painfully “snatching this relic,” namely, Shelley’s heart from the pyre, that it appears as the epigraph to The Romantic Ideology. Not only is this a vision of poetry prompting personal transformation of “genuine change,” it is also another trope of the dead returning from the grave to redirect the present, akin to those returns hailed by Southey but contravened by Shelley himself in “Ozymandias.” Recovering the “unconsumed heart of

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the poem” entails summoning the type of aesthetic experience that the critical vantage had seemed to displace. Thus there are odd moments of revealing vacillation in McGann’s argument in which he cautions against “debunking or deconstructing the actual works themselves” (1) and praises Heinrich Heine for remaining “deeply involved with and sympathetic toward the literary works he criticized so trenchantly” (11). McGann goes so far as to praise Heine’s ability, despite his criticism, to allow past works to “live and move and have their being in the present” (11)—silently adapting St Paul’s speech at the Areopagus about faithfully dwelling amid the Divine Nature (Acts 17:28). While the politically astute critical vantage seems to call for “reducing poetic works to a network of related themes and ideas,” McGann warns that this can prompt “a condition of being which no artistic product can tolerate without loss of its soul,” that is, the de-animating effects of dispelling the spirit of Ozymandias (11). Herein lies the dilemma that has emerged from within New Historicist and political criticism: how to proceed with a critical hermeneutic that undermines aesthetic power for justifiable political concerns while nevertheless appealing to some form of aesthetic power needed to pursue constructive goods that would further those same political commitments. Despite being McGann’s foil, Coleridge, by formulating the “willing suspension of disbelief,” has provided like-minded New Historicist thinkers an important resource for addressing this dilemma through a hermeneutic model that proffers social critique with a safeguarded literary experience.

“Ironic credulity” and the willing suspension of disbelief Coleridge points to a potential way out of this dilemma because he saw that it derived from two accounts of aesthetic experience— the wizard’s spell and the desert’s detachment—that were polar opposites.14 Either version will produce an undesirable effect that will undermine the positive goal of the other mode of experience. This would leave an insuperable ultimatum: either step back into the critical vantage that gains political immunity from ideology, but loses the individual and social benefits of aesthetic experience

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or surrender to aesthetic absorption that promises culturally constructive results, but loses the autonomy and liberation of ideological critique. The “willing suspension of disbelief” would seem to obviate this dilemma, not by making a Manichean choice, but by offering a third way, a middle way that not only recommends an approach to art but also better describes the experience of art. This section outlines Coleridge’s attempted via media and traces a genealogy for how it has appealed from Coleridge’s own time up to the vexed relationship between the aesthetic, the political, and the historical in the writing of Gallagher and Eagleton. Coleridge saw the “willing suspension of disbelief” as dispelling two false versions of aesthetic experience that mirror aesthetic absorption and the critical vantage. In an 1816 letter, he asserts that his “true Theory of Stage Illusion” supersedes a delusive aesthetic absorption, which he associates with the French neoclassical dramaturgists and theorists such as Boileau and Corneille. Coleridge asserts as well that his theory also avoids the opposite position, which is Samuel Johnson’s hyper-alert “common sense” view of the stage that allows no place for dreaming. His defi nition thus takes on a see-sawing movement between physiological action and subjective reaction: The forms and Thoughts act merely by their own inherent power: and the strong feelings at times apparently connected with them are in point of fact bodily associations, which are the occasions of the Images, not (as when we are awake) the effects of them. Add to this a voluntary Lending of the Will to this suspension of one of its operations (i.e., that of comparison & consequent decision concerning the reality of any sensuous Impression) and you have the true Theory of Stage Illusion—equally distant from the absurd notion of the French Critics, who ground their principles on the presumption of an absolute Delusion, and of Dr Johnson who would persuade us that our Judgements are as broad awake during the most masterly representation of the deepest scenes of Othello, as a philosopher would be during the exhibition of a Magic Lanthorn with Punch & Joan, & Pull Devil Pull Baker, & c on it’s painted slides. (CL 4.1010: 642) One of the facets of Coleridge’s intellectual method is the identification of two extremes that seem radically different but that

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ultimately “meet” to produce the same deleterious result.15 Here, these seemingly antagonistic models thwart or, at the very least, misrepresent aesthetic experience. On the one hand, Coleridge chooses a ridiculing term to offset the cultural authority of the “delusional” model of aesthetic reception. French neoclassicism had canonized a set of dramatic rules derived from the Early Modern recovery of Aristotle’s Poetics. Stringently reading Aristotle by the letter, this critical tradition reified the dramatic unities of time (events taking place within a day), place (a single simplified setting for the play), and action (one main plot not complicated by multiple or unresolved storylines).16 While it is possible to envision many factors for the particularly narrow gate through which Aristotle enters modern literary theory, Coleridge sees the Greek approach malformed by an inadequate view of the dramatic experience, which he calls “absolute Delusion.” In this model, a delusion must completely trick the audience member so that she is not aware that the dramatic events are not real. The unities of time, place, and action must be maintained to sustain credible verisimilitude for the utterly believing audience. Also, the deluded audience has become vulnerable to the artistic wizard directing that reality. The term “absolute” not only enforces the degree of captivation but also suggests a politically disreputable French absolutism, as terrifying and foreign as the tyranny of Ozymandias. Coleridge also found a delusional model in aspects of the philosophy of associationism, which he himself once held and which the Unitarian scientist and thinker Joseph Priestley applied to art in his Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777). Associationism sees human action and thought as tightly bound up with the physical world and, in general, sees human thought and action as derived from a series of chain reactions, for which anatomical terms can provide a complete account. According to Priestley, we are physically hardwired to react with strong emotions to striking objects. The same may be said of similar objects presented dramatically: Vivid ideas and strong emotions, therefore, having been, through life, associated with reality, it is easy to imagine that, upon the perception of the proper feelings, the associated idea of reality will likewise recur, and adhere to it as usual. (13.89)

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The strong emotions produced by strong stimuli carry with them, by the force of nature and neurology, a strong supposition of reality. James Engell thus succinctly concludes that art and literature, in Priestley’s theory, “may affect us as strongly as our own actual experience” (73). The dramatist’s task then is to use his skill and art to produce psycho-chemical responses, a state of “excitement,” in which concerns over the real and the fictional are disregarded, and, as a result, any ontological division between types of experience are effectively discarded.17 In Illusion and the Drama (1991), Fred Burwick argues that Coleridge’s 1808 lectures on “the principles of poetry” were a reaction against the “associationist” aesthetics of Richard Payne Knight, citing marginalia to Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste that are in Wordsworth’s handwriting but that may represent Coleridge’s thought (199–208). The manuscript question aside, Coleridge’s 1808 lectures clearly intervene against the aesthetics of both Priestley and Knight. For Coleridge in 1808, this version of associationism merely provides a sophisticated, more scientific account of neoclassical dramatic delusion, in which the individual is unconscious not only of the unreality of the artistic presentation but also unconscious of his own ascription of reality to it. Coleridge writes that distinct characters, appropriate style, charming language, and sentiment may indeed “increase the inward excitement” of the audience but that these are “all means to producing this chief end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion” (LitLects 1808–19 2: 267). “Willing” here, as it is in the “willing suspension of disbelief,” is no minor term. The persistent presence of the human will, which remains apart from and aware of its surroundings, is what distinguishes problematic delusion from true artistic illusion. Coleridge’s defense of the human will, elsewhere termed the conscience or the living soul that retained its freedom and could not relinquish its power to make choices, was central to his rejection not only of associationist aesthetics but also to what he saw as its deterministic and reductive metaphysics and anthropology. Yet, on the other hand, having too much will was also possible. The native good sense of Johnson, in Coleridge’s view, comes no closer than delusion to the “true Theory of Stage Illusion.” Johnson attacks the use of the unities, but does so at the expense of all belief, particularly of belief in Shakespeare’s characters and scenes. In his “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson writes that “the

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spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the fi rst act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players” (77). Like an impregnable stoic, an audience member ever remains unmoved and undeceived by the force of nature or art. In other words, literary illusion proves illusory. Being under delusion becomes a naïve position of uncritical absorption that should be shed. While Johnson is worlds removed from Eagleton or McGann politically and ideologically, nevertheless his account of a neutralized aesthetic experience approximates that provided by the critical vantage. For in the end, from Coleridge’s perspective, all extremes meet. In the case of both the stoic critical vantage and the absorbed delusion models, audience members never feel any tension between the playwright’s creation of a fictional reality and their own sense of what is real, no conflict between Shakespeare’s harrowing storm and their own serene comfort, no moral discomfort between what they and the artist desire. Yet, for Coleridge, neither stimulated absorption nor stoic resistance provides an adequate account of audience experience. If either did, a director would, in the former case, inflict medically diagnosable trauma on an audience when depicting violent or catastrophic events or, in the latter case, neglect to make a movie or play’s scenery more realistic in the face of an impenetrably incredulous audience. Nor does either represent what an audience’s reaction should be. Utter credence before Ozymandian art would make society vulnerable to tyrannical domination, and critical reserve could produce indifference and solipsism, as the individual stands aloof against art, nature, and his fellow beings. Neither model produces a fully formed person or a well-formed society. Instead, Coleridge suggests that, when encountering art, a spectator or reader does and should experience some delicate dialectic between belief and unbelief, between fiction and reality, between influence and resistance. The art of this middle way is best characterized as aesthetic illusion; the audience’s reaction as the “willing suspension of disbelief.” This aesthetic suspension is accomplished by an act of the will, of the intellect’s attempts to discern the reality of its sensory impressions. Again, it is voluntary and preserves human freedom, thus mitigating political concerns with ideological domination through art. Yet, the audience member still remains within the aesthetic experience, still participating

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within the unfolding drama. The dream is again, as Coleridge argued in his 1808 lectures, the best, and perhaps the only analogous experience. In dreaming, “the judgment is neither beguiled, nor conscious of the fraud, but remains passive” (LitLects 1808–19 2: 277). Again and again, Coleridge returns to syntax of “neither/nor” or “both/and” to describe this middle state. In the same letter to Stuart, he writes, “It is not strictly accurate to say, that we believe our dreams to be actual while we are dreaming. We neither believe or disbelieve it—with the will the comparing power is suspended, and without the comparing power any act of Judgment, whether affi rmation or denial, is impossible” (CL 4.1010: 641). By rejecting “either/or” models of aesthetic experience, these repeated attempts to characterize this aesthetic via media are all attempting to do justice to what Coleridge thinks is actually the common experience of most in the audience. Coleridge’s terms need further exactitude, but it is worth noting now that the common, repeated elements in each description are a volitional relaxation of the faculties that are concerned with judging what is true and good; the end result is an aesthetic experience that can be engaged, but that remains at liberty. The Biographia Literaria’s “willing suspension of disbelief” has resonated as the most succinct, compelling account of this middle state. Coleridge’s formulation of this middle state has particularly appealed to twentieth-century literary theorists concerned that scientific advances have put all imaginative literature under a critical vantage that distances us from the “magic” of art. In his book Science and Poetry (1926), I. A. Richards worries that science has undermined false but salutary “pseudo-statements” in poetry about “God, about the universe, about human nature, the relations of mind to mind, about the soul, its rank and destiny” (60). No matter how “vital” such dogma were to human “wellbeing,” restoring authority to these outworn creeds was impossible for “sincere, honest and informed minds” (60). Admitting the humanistic benefits poetry from the prescientific “Magical View” (47–50), Richards prescribes a version of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in which we “cut our pseudo-statements free from belief, and yet retain them, in this released state, as the main instruments by which we order our attitudes to one another and to the world” (61). In other words, suspended disbelief provides a mode of receiving premodern literature that could potentially

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catalyze “genuine change” in the way we live our lives by sidestepping modern science’s skeptical sway. Likewise, in his essay “Belief and the Suspension of Disbelief,” M. H. Abrams turns to Coleridgean terms for a way out of the disinterested, unhistorical New Criticism that does not then admit partisanship or political faction. Interested in delimiting and thus preserving the limits of this receptive via media, he argues that it does not produce moral relativism. The poet cannot “evade his responsibility to the beliefs and prepossessions of our common experience, common sense, and common moral consciousness” nor can he “require our consent to positions so illiberal, or eccentric, or perverse that they incite counterbeliefs which inhibit the ungrudging ‘yes’ that we grant to masterpieces” (28–9). Both Abrams and Richards appeal to Coleridge to preserve art’s reformist or therapeutic benefits untethered from intertwined truth claims and political coercion. By the end of the century, Gene Ruoff significantly challenged these type of projects in his contribution to The Romantics and Us (1990). Ruoff deflates the hope of Abrams’s liberal humanism as an aberrational moment of “Wordsworthian ecumenicism” whose apparent commonality required cultural coercion to maintain. His reformulation of the “willing suspension of disbelief” instead emphasizes subversion and ambiguity. While undercutting any professorial project of mores-building, Ruoff sees Coleridge’s middle way as suspending our judgment, our moral sense, our program, our historical presuppositions so that we can appreciate the “poetic dialogic which is equally capable of rejecting beliefs which, however, attractive, compelling, or characteristic of the age, are found somehow inadequate” (301). His postmodern challenge to twentieth-century calls for aesthetic conviction uses the very concept of “the willing suspension of disbelief” to restore the skeptical, critical distance that had been used by Abrams and Richards to overcome such aesthetic detachment. Given this brief, far from exhaustive, but representative genealogy of the various tasks to which Coleridge’s critical concept has been put, Gallagher’s recent turn to Coleridge in her explication of the rise of fictionality and her theoretical meditation with Greenblatt on the reading practices of New Historicism emerge as a brilliant synthetic development of this critical conversation. In “The Rise of Fictionality,” Gallagher argues that novel reading takes shape from a modern milieu of negotiated contracts and business pitches that

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must be adjudicated using news of uncertain accuracy, predictions of unclear futures, and reportage of unknown trustworthiness. She argues that the ability to navigate this tense combination of communication, transaction, and deliberation, of “disbelief, speculation, and credit” was not confi ned to commerce but became a “universal requirement” for approaching everything from courtship to jurisprudence (345–7). To avoid being taken in, such a culture discourages “faith” as a “habit of mind” and promotes those “trained in an attitude of disbelief” (346). In a striking re-reading of Coleridge’s terminology also used in Practicing New Historicism, Gallagher sees the novel and its associated hermeneutic practices as corresponding to these cultural practices: “Novels seek to suspend reader’s disbelief, as an element is suspended in a solution that it thoroughly permeates” (346). In other words, rather than faith, it is disbelief in which modern readers live, move, and have their being. This deployment of the “willing suspension of disbelief” may initially seem, like Ruoff’s, to reinstate the type of aesthetic neutralization seen in Eagleton’s literary theory, McGann’s critical intervention, or Hazlitt’s protests against Shakespearean productions. Yet, Gallagher’s exegesis of Coleridge to develop a critical approach of “ironic credulity” actually claims the opposite—to enhance rather than negate aesthetic experience (346). Departing from the critical vantage, she argues that novels offer themselves as fictional worlds with no ends beyond reading pleasure. Once the reader has willingly accepted this offer, she may listen fully and freely to every line and give indulgent time and concern to every dream and scheme. She need not go behind stage, but conditionally remains in thrall. Unlike every other fraught arena of modern life, artistic compacts have no pivotal stakes, no potential for great loss and gain. Albeit for the moment, the novel provides a uniquely “free space” or safely “controlled situation” (347, 348). The artistic encounter thus begins with “irony,” a managed choice to enter the author’s aesthetic world made in the monitored spirit of stoic distance. Under such conditions, the pact between artist and reader will reliably begin and end without chance of ongoing peril or ultimate risk. Because of these initial terms and the persistent awareness of fictionality, the resulting aesthetic pleasures cannot overwhelm the reader or really seduce her allegiance, love, or fortune. Art provides the same “intense

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engagement” as a proposed business deal in the harrowing highstakes world of getting and spending, but, without the pressure to write a cheque, the aesthetic remains in a “passive mode without risk” (348). Paradoxically, because this middle state is jointly acknowledged as fictional, readers can thus be free to intensify their aesthetic engagement and reactions and follow an author’s solicitation for “greater responsiveness” and provision of “more vivid perception” (348). Gallagher thus offers what may be the most sophisticated statement of the way that “suspended disbelief”—interpreted as an “ironic credulity” whose dubiety enables aesthetic delight—attempts to resolve the tension between enthralled absorption and stoic detachment for the modern reader: “She had the enjoyment of deep immersion in illusion because she was protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief” (349).

The limits of the willing suspension of disbelief Yet even Gallagher’s nuanced and original formulation of “ironic credulity” is subject to the limitations of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as it is more commonly understood. In a recent consideration of Renaissance dramaturgy and religion, Susannah Brietz Monta has argued that Coleridge’s critical concept inadequately describes the depth of experience demanded from the audience in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. For Monta, Coleridge has bequeathed a mere “temporary willingness not to disbelieve” that is a “suspension of quotidian skepticism” (115). Monta rightly targets the “willing suspension of disbelief” as an experience built on a double negation. It begins with the nugatory reserve of disbelief, which is then doubly reserved in the restrained suspension of not disbelieving. “Disbelief” remains a negation of “belief”; it is a lack of a quality, a short-circuiting of the faculty of belief. It is synonymous with suspicion. And the phrase implies that such suspicion is not only our starting point and natural state but also that this suspicion is the underlying reality that endures and underwrites all aesthetic encounters. Illusions can be enjoyed, but disbelief is what is real. The disbelief can be suspended. There can

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be not “not believing,” but the double negative of not “not belief” never quite equals belief. It is always saying, “you’re lying” to the “hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” As a result, the engagement is not a real engagement. It is a “not disengagement”; a short flirtation, but not a serious love affair. It can be entertained and even a bit taken, but it will not be taken in or taken away. It goes nowhere, because it does not open the round green door, and is only willing to look “for the moment” through the circumscribed reality of a peephole. For Monta, the critical influence of this Coleridgean quote is an understanding of “audience engagement” that is less than the active “imaginary commitment” required at the pivotal moment of dramatic resolution in The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare’s fantastic play features a romantic plot that is difficult to summarize, but may be most readily described as a potentially tragic case of King Leontes’s jealousy misdirected toward his fellow monarch Polixenes and his innocent Queen Hermione, with apparently fatal results for the latter. The confl ict is only rendered comedic through the subsequent generation in the courtship of Polixenes’s son Florizel and Perdita, Hermione’s lost child. The resentment and misunderstanding of the fi rst generation would have embittered the love of the second, however, if not for the intervention of Hermione’s friend Paulina, who had secreted away Hermione and protectively misreported her death. In a climactic scene, Paulina presents Leontes with a supposed statue of his deceased wife, believed to be a lovely but unliving artwork by most characters. It is not until the statue comes to life and Hermione thus returns from the grave that Leontes fi nally relents and can fully convert his heart, achieving reunion with Paulina, restoring his friendship with Polixenes, and bestowing his blessing on their children’s marriage. The re-animation, which is a moment of both recognition and reversal or anagnorisis and peripeteia in Aristotle’s terms (18–19),18 is preceded by Paulina’s challenging ultimatum to her audience both inside and outside the play: “It is requir’d/ You do awake your faith. Then all stand still; / Or those that think it is unlawful business / I am about, let them depart” (V.iii.94–7). Monta has explored Paulina’s requirement of “faith” in its early modern theological context in greater depth, but two aspects of the scene warrant highlighting for my argument about Coleridge’s influential critical concept in the nineteenth century

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and beyond. First, Paulina’s reference to a potentially “unlawful” act subtly but unmistakably represents her as a magi figure, who pretends to have powers to raise the spirits of the dead. As in Oz and Middle Earth, this wizard is again connected with art and demands the passive obedience of “standing still,” thus raising moral and political questions about the legitimacy of becoming subject to such a magical and powerful display. Second, Paulina evacuates any middle ground, including the via media seemingly offered by the “willing suspension of disbelief.” She either will have a completely captive audience or a total “departure,” which would imply the type of distanced aesthetic removal maintained by the politically astute critical vantage. Third, the play’s comedic resolution is contingent on choosing to behold in a trusting act of faith. Without surrendering to the gaze of the statue, there can be no “potentially transformative effects” and no “genuine change.” Without this consummating but contingent experience, which becomes unavailable to either the critical vantage or the compromising “willing suspension of disbelief,” Leontes would have remained personally wounded and the community socially fragmented. No bond across generations, like that formed by Trelawney’s grasp of Shelley’s heart, would have been made. In this turn to Shakespeare, it is crucial to note that “disbelief” alone, suspended or otherwise, was insufficient to respond to or account for the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale, which requires a full aesthetic encounter constituted by something akin to faith’s holistic investment. Settling on suspended disbelief as a guide out of the aesthetic antimony may fi nd a middle way between delusion and distance, but it is a resolution that remains decidedly limited. In other words, the “willing suspension of disbelief” as thus understood may be safe, but it is not sufficient to realize the goods of art and literature. In these terms, Coleridge’s critical legacy may seem to recommend a middling mentality that may even curtail aesthetic experience as Monta demonstrates in the case of Renaissance stagecraft. Yet even in Gallagher’s compelling, nuanced formulation, the “willing suspension of disbelief” would seem inadequate. To be discovered maintaining a pose of “ironic credulity” at Hermione’s re-animation would be an embarrassment, that of an awkward interloper expecting entertainment when awe or wonder are decorous. It would be crashing a wedding or festival, a mourning or a funeral. Such embarrassment assumes that such

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an audience member would have even been present for the statue’s unveiling. Paulina seems unlikely to have struck a bargain for a banquet ticket in the “bartering” that precedes “ironic credulity.” In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien argues even more stridently for the practical limitations placed on aesthetic encounters by the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Tolkien’s piece has been recognized by many as an important touchstone for understanding fairy tales and fantasy literature and for defi ning Tolkien’s key terms: the “eucatastrophe” or unexpected happy ending that offers a theologically inflected glimpse of hope in human history; “subcreation,” which considers humanity’s creation of literature and art as a God-given ability to imitate God who created the “Primary World,” or the ordinary reality that we understand to be our world; and fi nally that we do this by creating “Secondary Worlds” or coherent and compelling fictional realities from the materials of the Primary world.19 Fewer have seen the essay as one of the most significant engagements with the thought of Coleridge, who is not mentioned by name in the text even though the “willing suspension of disbelief” serves as the foil for Tolkien’s own literary theory. 20 For Tolkien as for Monta, the phrase does not recommend the active wonder of a child, but rather a grown-up “state of mind” that is “tired, shabby, or sentimental” (61). It is the result not only of bad creating in poorly constructed art whose flaws inevitably disenchant, but also of bad believing—lethargic, cynical “going along.” Tolkien writes: The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to fi nd what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed. (60–1) Tolkien identifies the dynamic of suspended disbelief as a remedial state, a modified version of the critical vantage. It arises with a broken illusion and thus takes stoic distance as its starting place.

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What Tolkien clarifies is that the “willing suspension of disbelief” may be the best that one can do to keep going, to bide one’s time, or to provide some form of consolation before an artwork whose world fails to deliver meaning or hope. It may provide some measure of aesthetic purpose, but this delimited “going along” can hardly be called, for Tolkien, an ideal or a goal. Nor would it be sustainable, as the short patience of a parent trapped in even the most magical of tea parties consistently attests. The limitations of this delimited middle way appear even more clearly in the popular manifestations of suspended disbelief. One of the more renowned recent usages came amid some of the worst days of the Iraq war. In a congressional hearing on September 11, 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton used it to describe her skeptical but polite response to General Petreaus’s claims before Congress of progress in the war. “I think that the reports that you provide to us,” intoned the Senator, “really require the willing suspension of disbelief.” Her tone did not convey equal parts of irony and credulity. Online commentators did not miss the antagonism, providing headlines about the then senator “sparring with” and “dissing” the then unimpeachable general. They interpreted her use of the phrase to mean: “I’ve listened, but while listening, I did not really even begin to buy it. I have listened, but will not hear.” Coleridge’s phrase provided an erudite and polite way of expressing this thoroughly skeptical and immovably oppositional position. 21 Clinton’s rhetorical stand made great political theater, but it was different in kind from Tolkien’s enchantment or Shakespeare’s attentiveness to re-animating and reconciling art. Clinton’s intervention raises the question of what effect can occur in an audience member girded by a suspended disbelief that is a form of restrained antipathy? The senator’s usage suggests that it is very little, and that the state is adopted to safeguard stasis, even as it begrudgingly admits an aesthetic experience, or at least enables the audience member to plausibly lay claim to an aesthetic experience. Clinton, however, had not moved far from the desert, maintaining a reserve that is defensively unreceptive, even if it cannot be accused of prejudicial dismissal. A recovery of aesthetic experience in order to regain the benefits of aesthetic experience would likewise be hindered by this preemptive reserve, including Eagleton’s recent reconsideration of the purpose of reading in The Event of Literature (2012). The

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book explicitly revisits the “strongly anti-essentialist” argument of Literary Theory: An Introduction for both intellectual and political reasons (19). Eagleton seems to have grown disenchanted with the thoroughgoing disenchantment of the critical vantage and what Eagleton identifies as the strain of skeptical nominalism dominating poststructuralist literary theory. The latter, he contends, has lost its power of political critique, partly from the persistent ascendance of capitalism and partly from its own inherent limitations in resisting capitalism’s ideological force. In Eagleton’s formulation, nominalism too easily, if inadvertently, allies with socially and politically irresponsible forms of “possessive individualism” when resisting all claims for any categorical realities that could elicit obligation or respect (13). In addition, nominalism renders everything pliable, re-constructible. It thus too easily, if inadvertently, allies with socially and politically irresponsible forms of free-market “creative destruction” because it has no consistent logical, moral, or intellectual foundation to “protect the integrity of things” (17). If the critical vantage levels all of nature into shifting sands, unravels the baseless fabric of communities, and deems human lives insubstantial dreams, then such a nominalist skepticism is hard-pressed to defend them as realities when threatened with dissolution by exploitative economic or political powers. Building on the communal and personal ends suggested for literature in his earlier work, Eagleton sets about reviving an approach to literature that would represent a “softer version of essentialism” that mitigates the disintegrating nominalism of Literary Theory: An Introduction (22). With the help of Alain Badiou’s event theory and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulation of family resemblances, The Event of Literature proposes five characteristics that can be said to constitute literature: fictional, moral, linguistic, nonpragmatic, and normative. Equipped with an understanding of these traits that are defi ned only to an apposite degree of stringency and deployed with appropriately flexible rigor to any particular species of the literary, The Event of Literature seems poised to offer an alternative to the cultural and communal mortification of Literary Theory: An Introduction. Yet, Eagleton’s revised methodology seems inadequate to reclaiming literature as a contributing factor to social, political, and personal renewal as it remains confi ned by the

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conceptual limitations of the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Having established the potential political witness of realism and essentialism, Eagleton’s efforts then focus on softening his softer version of literary essentialism. He remarks of his five distinguishing literary characteristics in Event of Literature: “Most of the rest of this study will be devoted to illustrating how these factors fail to yield us a defi nition of literature” (29). This puts Eagleton’s reader in an awkward, ambivalent position much like that of Tolkien’s tolerant reader whose suspended disbelief tries to salvage something from a failed artwork. Eagleton’s “failure” is, however, intentional. To disavow any taint of reactionary essentialism or, perhaps, accusations of Wordsworthian “middle-aged” political and intellectual apostasy (29), Eagleton consistently negates without totally destroying those literary characteristics he had earlier evinced. For the reader and critic of literature, the only way forward seems to not disbelieve in the literary, to accord it a double-negative status. Yet the perspective remains that of a distanced outsider, albeit one with a somewhat stifled skepticism and greater degree of kindliness. The strategy of this approach mirrors Eagleton’s earlier polemic against what he views as the smug, intellectually faulty, and socially irresponsible “new atheism” of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (a Gog and Magog Eagleton wittily conflates as “Ditchkens”) in Faith, Reason and Revolution (2010). Therein, he seeks to dissolve the nominalism of Ditchkens with arguments drawn from a theological tradition of realism. Yet even while using it to good effect against his skeptical opponents, Eagleton repeatedly and clearly stresses that he dissents from this more robust version of faith and metaphysics. So, one of Eagleton’s readers may be left disbelieving in the “new atheism” or deconstructive nominalism, but that conclusion is based on arguments that are not disbelieved, or possibly entirely disbelieved, but that were assumed, temporarily, as a strategic intervention to dislodge an ideological opponent’s assuredness. The lithe nuance of this intellectual position may be admirable, but this is a via media requiring such considerable existential to-ing and fro-ing, such labile forgetfulness and nimble insincerity, that it would be sustainable only “for a time,” much like the willing suspension of disbelief. Ultimately and unfortunately, the necessary intellectual gymnastics would also seem to preclude literature from offering

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the personal or political desiderata sketched in Literary Theory: An Introduction or fi rmly witnessing against nominalism in order to “protect the integrity of things.” Yet even as Eagleton’s argument for going beyond the critical vantage cannot escape the negatory limits of the willing suspension of disbelief, he effectively warns that its underlying disconnected distancing and doubting can too easily be co-opted into a “possessive individualism.” It may seem counterintuitive that the reserved commitment of the willing suspension of disbelief would be vulnerable to an ad campaign, but Eagleton’s keen insight is that this mindset too easily morphs into capitalism’s privileged consumer. For an apt illustration, the parodic journal The Onion makes an unlikely but revealing foray into romantic literary theory in an article titled “Suspension of Disbelief Goes Unrewarded.” It tells the bathetic tale of a Chicago suburbanite, Geoffrey Spalding, who summoned the “willing suspension of disbelief” but who failed to be entertained by “a young dancer discovering her dark side” in the critically acclaimed fi lm Black Swan, despite previously being “enraptured by a rat who aspires to be a chef and a man who ages backward.” The article continues with typical deadpan: “It wasn’t easy, but I held up my end of the deal,” Spalding said of the mental effort he put forth to accept the invented premises of a fictional world and temporarily disregard their implausibility. “What do I get in return? A thoughtful exploration of our inward nature transferred to an imaginative context? A semblance of truth confronted through a skillful narrative process? Nope, I don’t get shit.” This clever snippet illustrates the “willing suspension of disbelief” as a fundamental failure of the type Tolkien described. Both Tolkien and this moviegoer blame the artist as falling short. Yet it is difficult to sympathize with “Geoffrey Spalding” and to believe that he has truly “held up” his “end of the deal.” The willing suspension of disbelief is overly passive and accords with the lethargy of the always right, ever justified customer, whining forth: “I paid my money, I clicked on the link, now, in return, entertain me, move me, inspire me.” If a true aesthetic experience is to be had, then this position of hardly restrained antipathy and entitlement does not seem like

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a way of fi nding deeper enjoyment or appreciation, of discovering truth in our illusions, or of harnessing a transformative experience that could make us more fully human. Could Geoffrey Spalding adequately engage with Paulina’s incantation, or would he sulk off? Even if he remained, would it be possible for him to be moved to embrace the restored Perdita? With apologies to Ratatouille, it is difficult to imagine any work of art magisterial enough to penetrate the bourgeois petrification of Spalding’s intellectual habits, which have been formed or at least reinforced by the static seal of “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Gallagher’s account of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as “ironic credulity” or “‘ironic’ assent” (“Rise” 347) culminates in a reader with a similarly assured subjectivity, a parallel sense of control, invulnerability, and entitlement. The commercial terms are explicit in Gallagher’s depiction of suspended disbelief’s provision of a “risk-free emotional investment” (351). A reader habituated in this practice emerges with an elevated sense of self in which fictionalized characters are expected to deliver two services to the psyche: What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character. On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love an equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or any other excuse for existing. (361) This experience thus confi rms, affi rms, and even amplifies the consuming individual’s position of prominent privilege and possession, in masterful control of relationships and representations. This is a reader who is always right. Despite the “we” invoked, however, this consumer is also alone. This unitary “I” may love beyond the self, but these attachments are bound by irony. They remain unreal and temporary, susceptible to abandonment and detachment at the pleasure of the subject. This may be an apt historical description of the emergence of the eighteenth-century consumer of the novel, of the reading habits

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of what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “buffered self” (37–9). Yet it raises questions about the habits of being of a subject thus inculcated or the willing suspension of disbelief as a literary theory that would recommend this “lofty position” (346). With such attenuated sense of attachment to others and the world, this “possessive individualism” would not seem to foster either Trelawney’s suffering love that recovers a lost friend’s heart or the hobbit’s longing love that leaves behind a suburban hoard.

Beyond not disbelieving Where then does this leave the “willing suspension of disbelief” as the “middle way” solution to literary theory’s fundamental problem? Does this approach surpass a limiting polarity that dictates either the sterile but safe disenchantment of the stoic critical vantage or vulnerable but affective absorption? Unfortunately, it seems that even the most nuanced and compelling re-reformulations of the “willing suspension of disbelief” moderate, but do not ultimately overcome the limitations of either problematic pole. Eagleton’s analytic recovery of literary experience remains too actively resistant to be transformatively receptive, and Gallagher’s “ironic credulity” remains enmeshed in the more subtle mental strands of capitalist ideology. From a pragmatic perspective, it could be argued that these versions of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” despite being imperfect and incomplete, nevertheless address those limitations, curbing the worst effects of either pole to a sufficient degree. Yet even if a less ambitious standard were conceded, the via media of the “willing suspension of disbelief” nevertheless remains too guarded to realize literature’s goods, those contributions to our individual and social lives that even generally skeptical thinkers such as Eagleton or McGann have desired. In the name of a more satisfactory literary theory responsive to these human ends, critics such as Monta and Tolkien have tried to push beyond Coleridge and call for a new critical concept to supersede the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Tolkien cannot settle for what he sees as its inevitable degeneration into a prisoner’s game for combating indifference. Instead, he gestures toward an alternative “genuine thing.” In this new condition, we would feel “inside” the world of the work; and that world would feel “true”; this state

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would not be self-consciously generated, but simply there; instead of “not not believing,” Tolkien calls such engaged, intense, receptive attentiveness “Primary Belief” (72). Monta likewise argues that The Winter’s Tale asks for a more nuanced sense of theatrical faith that is “understood as a faith necessarily mixed with doubt, requiring intense, ongoing, emotive, individual and communal assent and engagement” (124). In so doing, both critics reject Coleridge as they reject the “willing suspension of disbelief.” They nevertheless, like Gallagher, maintain his terminology. This theological framework, however, was Coleridge’s unique, enduring contribution to the issue of aesthetic illusion that had been broached by thinkers from Home to Herder. D. I. Morrill writes of Coleridge: “No one before him had been able to expound the principle so clearly, or to give it such complete and consummate expression” (444). If this is correct, what distinguishes Coleridge’s “consummate expression” from preceding accounts of dramatic illusion was his framing of this aesthetic problem with the theological language of suspending disbelief and poetic faith. Yet in interpretations of Coleridge’s theory from Tolkien to Gallagher the meaning of belief, faith, and disbelief are inconsistent and unclearly delineated.22 Are the “willing suspension of disbelief” and “poetic faith” synonymous? What does it mean that the “suspension of disbelief” constitutes what he calls “poetic faith?” What is the relation of the theological and literary in this context? Is poetic faith a secular escape from dogmatic religious demands for belief? Or is there a synthetic, complementary relationship between these faculties of faith? These are difficult interdisciplinary questions, but if Coleridge’s terminology is maintained, they need to be addressed. These questions should point back to, rather than beyond, Coleridge, who thought deeply but often frenetically about these terms and their meanings. The diction, rhetoric, allusions, and imagery of the seminal passage of Biographia Literaria link to the organic network of footnotes and fragments that is Coleridge’s strange and voluminous body of writing. The next chapter will argue that Coleridge himself saw “poetic faith,” when fully understood within his overarching intellectual and theological project, as advancing beyond the “willing suspension of disbelief,” approximating the aesthetic and existential qualities of Tolkien’s “genuine thing,” and offering a literary theory that would overcome the polar problems of aesthetic illusion and would access art’s promise for human flourishing.

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Notes 1 For the seminal work restoring the French Revolution to prominence in romantic studies in the wake of the relatively ahistorical approaches of the New Critics and Deconstructionists, see Butler 11–38. For the more recent extension of the political contexts beyond the Revolution to include later events in the 1810s such as the Regency controversy, Waterloo, and Peterloo, see Chandler. For the often overlooked vitality and power of conservative literary responses, see Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution. For the second-generation or “Hunt Circle” engagement with this cultural milieu, see Cox, Poetry and Politics, 16–37 and Mahoney 13–32. 2 For an account of Cruikshanks’s early life and political commitments, particularly his involvement with Hone, see Patten 121–86 and Haywood 39–43. For his continued critical representations of George IV, see Patten 176. For Hunt’s refusal to negotiate a way out of his persecution for seditious libel, see Roe 176. 3 For the “Occupy Wall Street” appeal to Shelley, see Scott Noble’s online film Rise Like Lions: O.W.S. and the Seeds of Revolution. For Patten’s reading of Cruikshank’s 1819 print Poor Bull & his Burden, depicting the people’s power as a bull rather than a lion and asking “What will become of these Vermin, if the Bull should Rise?” see Patten 156–7. 4 This passage is from Hunt’s 1818 translation in Foliage, which is drawn from Homer’s Illiad 18.251–3, 262–6. 5 For Linda Colley’s argument that all of the elements scourged by Cruikshank—partrician classicism, ornate class-bound fashion, and military prowess—converge in Wellington (191), see the analysis of “Dominance” in Britons 164–93. For an argument that Cruikshank’s anti-monumentalism informs Cruikshank’s Peterloo illustrations that rebuff the nationalist pride cast into St George and the Dragon statuary and abolitionist medallions, see Wood’s Radical Satire and Print Culture 205–12. 6 For the proliferation of monuments surrounding Trafalgar and Nelson as part of what Wood calls the “well-publicized and unprecedented boom in public monuments which occurred in the first two decades of the nineteenth century” (205–7), see White’s The Trafalgar Captains and part two of Cannadine’s Trafalgar in History. 7 For The Examiner’s coverage throughout 1815 of the delayed construction of a monument to Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, see articles from issues 400 (August 27) 553; 409 (October 29) 700; and 418 (December 31) 843–5.

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8 Despite being one of the most well-known of romantic poems, Kelvin Everest notes, with puzzlement, that the “sonnet has attracted very little attention from Shelley’s commentators” (“‘Ozymandias’: The Text in Time” 25). While there has been a persistent inquiry into sources and the poem’s poststructuralist, selfreferential linguistic structure, more recent historical and political studies have been gravitating toward its colonial contexts (D’haen). This discussion situates the anti-monumentality in “Ozymandias” within Britain’s domestic cultural politics, in order to extend Cox’s discussion of its collaborative origin in Poetry and Politics, 66–71. 9 For a discussion of the political and poetic phantom of “England in 1819,” see Chandler 23–32. 10 For the use of Coleridge’s phrase from “Frost at Midnight” to describe the Lake poet’s cultural resituation, see Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry. 11 For recent work in literary theory that likewise acknowledges the importance of critique but also seeks to understand its limitations, see Felski and Latour. 12 For the etymological and conceptual link of culture to cultivation, see Berry’s Unsettling of America, 87; for its link to “cult” or religious community, see Pieper xiv. 13 Because I am arguing that there are appeals to aesthetic experience in critical modes that have often been grouped, for praise or blame, into the category of “hermeutics of suspicion,” I have avoided that frequently polemical label, which can debilitate rather than open up exploration of critical possibilities. For further considerations of the critical history of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and its relation to aesthetics, see Armstrong 25–82 and Felski 215–20. 14 For the importance of polarity in Coleridge’s philosophical method, see Barfield 26–40. For a broader account of Coleridge’s attempts to negotiate positions of unity and diversity, see Perry 18–34. 15 Coleridge’s uses of this “adage of inexhaustible exemplification” (C&S 96) are too numerous to cite, but “all extremes meet” is the fi rst entry in Aids to Refl ection (AR 11). In politics, it fused the “errors” outside of the British mixed constitution: “A democratic Republic and an Absolute Monarchy agree in this; that in both alike, the Nation, or People, delegates its whole power” (C&S 96). In religion, the extremes outside of the Anglican via media found similar treatment: “the Reformers . . . had seen and felt the abuses consequent on the popish theory of Christianity . . . and intended to reconstruct the church . . . upon the plan of the primitive ages. But the Puritans pushed this bias to an absolute bibliolatry . . . Men of learning, however, soon felt that this was wrong in the other

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extreme, and indeed united itself to the very abuse it seemed to shun” (TT 2: 105). For a discussion of Coleridge’s application of the principles, see Tomko, British Romanticism, 43. 16 For a summary of the dramatic unities, see the entry for “Three Unities” in Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, 320–1. For the transformation of Aristotle in neoclassical literary theory, see Weinberg. 17 For a more recent version of the “suspension of disbelief” in which the role of the will is diminished and possibly dissolved, see Brinker. 18 In the standard subdivisions of Aristotle’s Poetics, the discussion of reversal and recognition takes place in chapter sections 6.2–6.4 or 1452a-b. 19 For assessments of the significance of “On Fairy Stories” in the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, see James and Mendlesohn’s claim that Tolkien’s “classic essay” is the “most valuable theoretical text” for defi ning fantasy (1) and James’s argument that it “has been as influential” as Lord of the Rings “in the construction of modern fantasy” (66). 20 For a discussion of Tolkien’s engagement with Coleridge’s defi nitions of the primary and secondary imagination from the Biographia Literaria, but not with the “willing suspension of disbelief,” see Reilly 210–11. 21 For a spirited discussion of the incident, including its afterlife in “‘blog’ life” and the implication that “Coleridge is relevant and the living power he believed poets should be—and more of a mystery than ever,” see Gaull 156. 22 For the significant exception to this disregard of theological inquiry into “faith” and “belief” as hermeneutic terms, see Monta’s discussion of their religious and metatheatrical meanings across the Reformation-era denominational spectrum (117–24). The following chapter will follow this methodology with regards to the theological thought of Coleridge, who himself often considered sources and key texts from Monta’s discussion, and will reach complementary conclusions about the nature of “poetic faith.”

CHAPTER TWO

Poetic faith Sailing to Malta, on a lonely night in 1804, Coleridge, still clinging to Unitarianism but desperately trying to believe in Trinitarian Christianity, turns his thoughts to questions about dramatic illusion: What is the Lear, the Othello, but a divine Dream/ all Shakespeare, & nothing Shakespeare.—O there are Truths below the Surface in the subject of Sympathy, & how we become that which we understandably behold & hear, having, how much God perhaps only knows, created part even of the Form.—[?and so] good night—(CN 2: 2086) What are these close but covered “Truths” hidden in the topic of sympathy? How could these truths demand that the sensory verbs “beholding” and “hearing” be modified by the neologistic adverb “understandably,” which is derived from an intellectual act? What could it mean that these dramatic dreams come from Shakespeare, but are also somehow co-created by the audience member in a way that only divine knowledge could fully illumine? It might be tempting to think that more complete answers to these questions dissolved in Coleridge’s dreams after he bids “good night,” like the lost lines of “Kubla Kahn.” Yet, these topics fascinated him throughout his life. Whatever they do mean, Coleridge’s mysterious inquiry signals that he found more things in them than could be dreamt of in the restrained, rationalistic hermeneutic of “the willing suspension of disbelief.” This chapter begins by pursuing Coleridge’s aesthetic

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approach to the “divine dream” of Shakespeare as an act of “poetic faith.” I will begin with Richard McCoy’s own appeal to “poetic faith” in his book Faith in Shakespeare (2013) that recognizes limitations like those of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in certain configurations of historicist studies. Yet, I will argue that McCoy’s use of “faith” and “belief,” though ostensibly derived from Coleridge, misrepresents the poet’s thought, and, as a result, remains subject to those limitations. A careful differentiation of those terms will instead yield a Coleridgean literary theory that culminates in “understandably beholding” and a cooperatively creative hermeneutic that may be identified as “poetic faith.” This “poetic faith” presents a more promising, though not untroubled, account of how and why to read literature.

“As a stranger give it welcome”: Beyond faith in Shakespeare Hamlet opens in darkness, as the huddled characters wait and try to make sense of the meaning and the veracity of what they are about to see. Exposed on a darkened parapet, the sentries and Horatio feel the chill air, biting cold against their skin. Apart from the weather, the characters in Hamlet and the audience of Hamlet fi nd themselves in a parallel situation. “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” asks Horatio to the gathered watchers, assembled for another performance of the spirit and a nightly showing of the play (I.i.27). Coleridge himself identified Horatio as “the representative of the ignorance of the Audience” (CM 4: 839). In this metatheatrical moment, they are trying to see what lies before them and make sense of what is happening in the dim scene. Who, or what, is this stranger that “would be spoke to?” (I.i.49). Horatio, dismissive of the ghost as “fantasy,” responds to its appearance fi rst with an accusation of “usurping” reality and then with the ineffective command of “Stay, illusion!” (I.i.27, 50, 131). The sentries do not wish to approach it at all and attack it when it comes too close (I.i.144–5). The opening scene closes as a failed scene, a failed encounter. They know nothing more about this “illusion.” They discover nothing about its identity, purpose, story, or portent. They have no relationship

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with it. Marcellus and the sentries are fearfully resigned and do not wish to get involved in the high matters, political or spiritual, presented by this challenging figure. Horatio begins not letting “belief take hold of him,” but can say at the scene’s conclusion that he does “in part believe it,” a position approximating the “not disbelieving” of the willing suspension of disbelief (I.i.28, 171). For these characters and for the audience, the play will not happen, and cannot even start, unless they change their vantage. The drama does unfold in earnest when Hamlet returns with Horatio and Marcellus in the fourth scene of the first act, and Hamlet meets this “questionable shape” with something akin to a Coleridgean “poetic faith” that can “as a stranger give it welcome” (I.iv.43, 174). In his book Real Presences (1989), the critic and theorist George Steiner fi nds, in this dramatic moment of uncertain greeting, the experience essential to any aesthetic encounter: Face to face with the presence of offered meaning which we call a text (or a painting or a symphony), we seek to hear its language. As we would that of the elect stranger coming towards us. (156)1 For Steiner, every artwork presents the same unavoidable questions that Hamlet himself asked: “Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?” (I.iv.57) What to do? How to proceed, especially when an illusion makes demands in order for its message to be heard? Horatio might suspend his disbelief, but he will not follow or allow Hamlet to go further. “What if it tempt you toward the flood,” Horatio critically objects, “Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff” (I.iv.69–70). Ultimately, Horatio stays back, defending the “sovereignty of reason” and condemning Hamlet’s trust as waxing “desperate with imagination” (I.iv.73, 87). Yet still the stranger calls and offers an encounter, a chance for meaning, an opportunity to hear, to see. Hamlet performs the willing suspension of disbelief, provisionally playing along and going along with the role the ghost seems to be performing: “I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane. O answer me!” (I.iv.44). Yet still, the stranger demands more. The spirit will not yet speak nor can it be fully seen from the pit. It continues to beckon, waving for Hamlet to accompany. It requires a deeper act of faith than a dubious bargain. Will Hamlet

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go? Will he see and hear? Will he instead return to the new king reveling with his mother, dismissing this as mere fantasy? Or will Hamlet follow and take the audience with him? Will he be there when the ghost turns to say, “List, O list!”? (I.v.23). Will they hear, as Horatio and Marcellus did not, this tale “whose lightest word would harrow up your soul?” (I.v.16–17). For if that act of faithful following is not made, the deeper truths of Denmark will remain unknown. It is appropriate that McCoy denotes such “faithful following” as “faith in Shakespeare,” because the ghost of Hamlet’s father is also one of the roles played by Shakespeare himself (Greenblatt 248–9). When McCoy explains how “belief in the ghost or in Hamlet itself” is “sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance” (xii), he turns to Coleridge’s “poetic faith” as a literary theory that resists what McCoy sees as a disenchanting, disillusioning “hermeneutic of suspicion” worthy of Horatio, that has accompanied the renewed interest in religion within Shakespeare studies (8). 2 Because it proceeds from the critical vantage of New Historicist studies, this turn or even “stampede” to situate Shakespeare within religious contexts—or social and political contexts dominated by religion—is anathema to McCoy’s faith in Shakespeare (xi), which he describes as “more theatrical and poetic than spiritual” and that acknowledges no “higher power than literature” (ix). Indeed, the New Historicist interest in “faith,” according to McCoy, has managed to be both too religious and too materialist, a case of extremes meeting. Therefore, McCoy hopes to recover a different type of “faith” that is an aesthetic engagement, a commitment and pursuit akin to Hamlet’s revelatory trust and Coleridge’s “Truths below the Surface in the subject of Sympathy.” In this, McCoy’s methodology accords with a more robust interpretation of Coleridge’s literary theory that would go beyond the hesitating reserve of either the critical vantage or the compromising “willing suspension of disbelief”: In watching a stage play, we can simultaneously see through its performances while remaining intensely absorbed. For Coleridge, theatrical illusion inspires a sophisticated but powerful poetic faith that moves beyond skeptical disbelief and delusional credulity. (17)

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In other words, McCoy sees Coleridge providing a formulation of aesthetic experience that moves beyond the problematic poles of the distancing desert (skeptical disbelief) and uncritical, magical enthrallment (delusional credulity). Yet for McCoy, this does not mean a type of middling, not-disbelieving or bartering tolerance. Rather, he generally eschews the “willing suspension of disbelief” for his preferred term “poetic faith,” which conveys the intense absorption and trusting commitment necessary to “understandably behold & hear” the tale of the ghost or of Shakespeare himself. What are the constituents of “poetic faith” for McCoy? First, it is active. McCoy rightly sees the distanced proceedings, which are often associated with the “willing suspension of disbelief,” as an inadequate response to the aesthetic encounter. As with Hamlet, a response must include “positive efforts” that are “neither frivolous nor inconsequential” (5). “Unhand me, gentlemen” cries Hamlet as he pushes past his reluctant friends (I.iv.84). Second, poetic faith is collaborative. The playwright and performers rely upon what McCoy calls the “mental effort” as well as the “good will and intelligence of a beloved audience,” for which Shakespeare’s plays often petition (5, 6). Unlike the passivity of the suburban moviegoer, the audience is called upon to co-create or half-create the aesthetic experience, as when Coleridge says sympathetic readers have “created part even of the Form.” Such communal creativity thrives best amid an atmosphere of benevolence, another salient aspect of “poetic faith.” McCoy calls this “kindness and compassion” (5); Coleridge “geniality” (SW F 1: 360). In either case, it points to “serious intellectual engagement and active goodwill” as necessary to constitute an aesthetic experience, which would simply not come to full fruition with the critical neutrality, antagonism, or fear of a Horatio, Marcellus, Hazlitt, or McGann (5). Indeed, Hamlet advances when he stops labeling the ghost an “it” or “thing”—an objectification of the other into a resource or tool—and instead uses “thee”—a recognition of mutuality, reciprocity, and hospitality (I.iv.62, 86).3 Finally, poetic faith produces a desirable, vital influence. An active, collaborative, and generous “poetic faith” promises to unlock “literature’s intrinsic powers,” which can transform human affairs in a way unique to the “potent but manifest illusions” of the aesthetic (xiii). McCoy does not differentiate between the two terms “suspended disbelief” and “poetic faith,” and he does call the latter an attractive “theoretical

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via media” (16). Nevertheless, his choice to privilege the term “poetic faith” and assign it such robust characteristics points to a critical mode whose receptivity outpaces the middling limitations of the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Such engagement with literature would seem to open the way to what McGann called “genuine change,” personal and communal, that was preempted by the critical vantage and curtailed by the willing suspension of disbelief. Yet if McCoy gestures beyond a neutralizing aesthetic that he fi nds in New Historicist studies of Shakespeare’s religion, how does he counter the opposite claim, which points to the need for protection from literature’s domination, from the subjugating gaze of the magi or Ozymandias? In many ways, McCoy’s absorptive “poetic faith” would seem to leave the audience member more vulnerable than simple enchantment as its emphasis on collaboration introduces a new level of knowing assent to the power of Southey’s illusion or Wellington’s imperial statuary. It gives Hamlet the trust and commitment to go forward, but does this “poetic faith” introduce a complicity that is worse than mere deception and would thus call for more, not less, of the resistance and distance provided by the critical vantage of New Historicism? For McCoy, however, the key term “poetic” distinguishes “poetic faith” from “naive faith” (8). The modifier “poetic” qualifies his committed participation from its problematic religious counterpart, which is a “faith in the divine and providential” (115). Paralleling the romantic project described in M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (1971), McCoy’s use of “poetic faith” seeks to preserve the magical effects of the stage against what he sees as the disillusioning gaze of New Historicism (9). McCoy’s natural faith in Shakespeare remains a “fundamentally literary and human phenomenon” (16). In McCoy’s working defi nition, religious faith is “constant, certain, and absolute, not erratic or optional” (4). It is completely antithetical to any form of doubt or questioning, and is, by its very nature, a-rational or irrational. Further, because religious faith tramples reason, it asserts and enforces confessional certainty with power and even lethal force. In Faith in Shakespeare, the “compulsive and futile quest for certainty” by Othello and the “fanatical conviction” of Leontes from The Winter’s Tale exemplify the type of dangerous faith that McCoy abjures as a “despotic perversion” of poetic faith (85, 118, 121). This violent mode enforces belief in “pernicious

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illusions” and demonstrates the “same blind spots of any obstinate faith in things unseen” (120–1). Distinguishing “poetic faith” from such credulous fanaticism is key to McCoy’s salvaging “inspiration” that is “earthbound not celestial” from the experience of literature without falling prey to the type of compulsion or indoctrination associated with blind theological credence (24). Ultimately for McCoy, “poetic faith” can be safe, secure, and civil because it is compatible with reason, unlike “religious faith” which is an avowed opponent of reason. This formulation of faith and reason, however, cannot be correctly attributed to Coleridge, who clearly states in Aids to Refl ection: “Whatever is against right reason, that no faith can oblige us to believe” (339). More significantly, however, McCoy’s rivalrous account of rationality and belief undermines his own attempt to revive “faith in Shakespeare.” While summoning a secular “poetic faith,” he anxiously introduces major qualifications to his aesthetic approach to distance it from religious faith. Poetic faith is to be, unlike religious faith, “conditional, tentative, and skeptical” (4). Further, in contrast to the “life and death” stakes of religious faith, poetic faith is “a far more limited, more congenial, and safer alternative” that is also “more moderate and less apocalyptic” (5, 15). Conditional, tentative, skeptical, moderate—these are the values of Horatio. They all return us to the willing suspension of disbelief and point the way to the critical vantage McCoy hopes to displace. Limits, safety, the congenial opinions of companions— these are the temptations that Hamlet refuses in order to hear the spirit’s revelatory tale. These modifications diminish the positive case McCoy makes for the importance of a “poetic faith” that goes beyond disenchantment. Under these limitations, this literary theory becomes a way of reading “not without faith” in the way that “suspending disbelief” was a “not disbelieving.” The emphatic need to distinguish his “poetic faith” from “religious faith” calls into question whether his mollified version of faith can claim to be significantly different from what he characterizes as the stampeding herd of skeptical and sectarian hermeneutics (xi). Further, if “poetic faith” must be parsed as “not without faith” or “not faithlessness,” then it risks losing not only its invested, collaborative energy but also its potent effects. Horatio’s gingerly incredulity would not have made it past Paulina, nor would Leontes have been transformed by beholding Hermione’s statue with such

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circumspection. McCoy also wants to distinguish between the contributions to human life from poetic and religious faith in ways that further beg the question. When McCoy dissociates himself from romantic literature’s “spilt religion” in which Keats hoped to fi nd salvation, he opts instead to “settle for ‘food for thought’ and ‘enjoyment’” (7).4 What exactly these desiderata mean is unclear, as is the reason they are couched in scare quotes. “Food for thought” suggests “something to think about,” but this is a phrase used, more often than not, at the end of a musing. The phrase, “That was some food for thought,” generally concludes an ambiguous topic so that the day’s business may begin. “Enjoyment” or “something to pass the time” runs the risk of being caught up in the consumerist dynamic of Gallagher’s novel reader or The Onion’s moviegoer. I do not wish to dismiss either of these—pleasure or musing—as unimportant in their own right, but the low-flying ambition of “food for thought” and “enjoyment” does not seem to warrant such a high-reaching term that “faith,” with its theological dangers, complications, and legacy, imparts to “poetic faith.” There are several broader difficulties with McCoy’s defi nition that opposes faith and reason so starkly. First, his recovery of an “intensely absorbed” aesthetic experience of secular “poetic faith” stills remains vulnerable to the political and personal dangers of becoming, in Horatio’s words, “desperate with imagination” (17; I.iv.87). Distancing his literary theory from religious fanaticism does not preclude other powers from misleading the audience member. While Horatio worries about the spirit luring Hamlet to danger, it is not difficult to imagine other nonspiritual rogues— this world’s “ferocious” Iagos with their “most vicious fictions” or another Oz without “supernatural aspirations” (22, 95, 24). Laertes, Wellington, Claudius, and Ozymandias were all secular authorities, though they were not afraid to arrogate to themselves a divine aura, as in the Ozymandian usurpation of the Biblical title “King of Kings.”5 Even though McCoy disavows the “spilt religion” of romantic bardolatry (12), his approach of appealing to the transcendent faculty of faith for imminent ends mirrors the romantic gospel praised by Abrams for imagining a “renewed mankind” that will “inhabit a renovated earth where he will fi nd himself thoroughly at home” (Natural Supernaturalism 12). As the cliffs and floods of history demonstrate all too well, this secularized type of natural supernaturalism, this half-holy view

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of the imagination, remains vulnerable to appropriation in ages of nationalism and capitalism. For McGann, such “poetic faith” originated within “a reactionary movement,” and, as with Marx’s religious opiate, remains “a drug on human consciousness” (26). Second, because McCoy’s consideration of Coleridge’s thought is limited, his “poetic faith” also misses an opportunity to examine whether the poet’s own nuanced and complex treatments of faith, reason, belief, and poetry could help address these persistent political problems while recovering a more robust approach to aesthetic experience. While Faith in Shakespeare pits confessional faith against creative faith, McCoy does admit that Coleridge himself often “blurs the distinction” as part of a broader romantic tendency toward humanist uplift (18, 7). Nevertheless, McCoy’s own version of “poetic faith” appeals to a selectively secularized Coleridge who upholds a stringent division of the two “faiths”: “For Coleridge, the human imagination rather than God inspires poetic vision, and, while it may operate independently of factual and natural constraints, it is a faculty of human nature” (114). For McCoy, Coleridge falls on the earthly side of a series of stark bifurcations between literature versus religion, imagination versus inspiration, and human versus divine. Yet romantic studies have benefitted from a “turn to religion” comparable to that in Early Modern and Renaissance criticism that has recovered a cultural milieu in which these split spheres did not hold. In his study of the romantic period, Robert Ryan has argued that religion was the “most conspicuous preoccupation of Britons at the time in their private and public lives” (2). This is even truer for Coleridge than for other major figures of the romantic period. From his early political and poetic activity among religious dissenters in his 1790s “radical years” to his strange blend of religion, philosophy, politics, and creativity in The Statesman’s Manual (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817), Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Refl ection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), to his theological “table talk” as the “sage of Highgate” at the end of his life, Coleridge’s moved seamlessly between “faiths” in ways that inspired spiritual leaders from John Henry Newman to F. D. Maurice and irked ideological opponents like Hazlitt.6 Apart from this contextual and biographical combination of religion and literature, the Biographia Literaria itself does not present such a “division,” a phrase that Coleridge himself

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philosophically resisted in favor of “distinction.”7 Jonathan Wordsworth has argued that even Coleridge’s famous defi nition of the imagination is informed by Coleridge’s manifestly religious understanding of the intellectual life: “Coleridge is at all times a Christian thinker. Philosophy is not a pastime, or an intellectual pursuit; it is a means of understanding the nature of God, and the nature of man’s relation to God” (31–2). In a close and compelling reading that roots Coleridge’s thinking in English sources ranging from Milton and Mark Akenside, to the philosophers Cudworth, Berkeley, and Hartley, to the religious and political dissent of the 1790s, Wordsworth fi nds an “Ascent of Being” embedded in Coleridge’s delineation of the fancy, the secondary imagination, and the primary imagination. While the fancy remains confi ned to the stuff of the material world and thus the most limited power of the human intellect, the secondary imagination can willfully re-order and thus re-create physical reality, making it the realm of the poetic. While many have seen this poetic faculty as Coleridge’s chief concern, Wordsworth makes a strong case that the primary imagination strives higher, as its adjective implies, and unites human perception or “understandably beholding and hearing” with participation in the divine as the “repetition in the fi nite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infi nite I am” (BL 1: 304). This latter culminating category of experience Wordsworth sees across Coleridge’s prose corpus under various names such as “love, or joy, or imagination, or reason” (38) and even “FAITH” in Religious Musings (32). Wordsworth concludes, “The primary imagination at its highest is the supreme human achievement of oneness with God; the secondary, though limited by comparison, contains the hope that in the act of writing the poet may attain to a similar power” (50). Parsing these defi nitions and their relative status is a perennial and perennially contested part of Coleridge studies.8 Nevertheless, it would be difficult to make the case for Coleridge completely insulating the human imagination in Biographia Literaria from transcendence, especially when he explicitly states that the primary and secondary imaginations differ “only in degree” and not in “kind” (BL 1: 304). As Wordworth’s analysis has shown, Coleridge’s sometimes cryptic statements can be better understood with close textual attention informed by an enlarged view across his writings to situate his terms and ideas within habitual patterns of thought. In order to advance a literary theory

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out of the Biographia Literaria’s “willing suspension of disbelief for a time, which constitutes poetic faith,” Coleridge’s terms “belief” and “faith”—as well as their connection to perception and to Wordsworth’s string of elevated terms “love,” “joy,” and “reason”—must fi rst be investigated with what Coleridge calls in Religious Musings a “stedfast unpresuming gaze” (PW 1.1.101: 177.48).

Desynonymizing “faith” and “belief”: Life, higher reason, and beholding truth McCoy defi nes his secular understanding of “poetic faith” against the defi nition of religious faith provided by Anthony Kenny in a 2007 article: “The common characteristic of faith in almost all religious traditions is its irrevocability. A faith that is held tentatively is no true faith. It must be held with the same degree of certainty as knowledge” (qtd. in McCoy 4, 85). In other words, religious faith must always be unwavering and unquestioning in its commitment, and, as the “other” of knowledge, faith’s commitment must be unrelated to, or even opposed to, searching rational examination. This defi nition of faith as reason’s adversary contrasts with Monta’s survey of early modern theologians who instead offer “nuanced readings of religious faith” that call into question the practice of some “modern literary scholars” who “assume a comparatively brittle sense of religious faith as belief—or simple credulity?—unmixed with doubt” (121). By applying Kenny’s simplified—rather than Monta’s delineated, historical—account of faith, McCoy indicts the maniacal drives of Shakespeare’s Leontes and Othello as fideistic fanaticism. Two underlying characteristics in Kenny’s defi nition lead to such a confl ation of religious faith and fundamentalism. First, behind the critique of “irrevocability” is a concept of “faith” as bifurcated. For individuals, faith is either “on” or “off,” “present” or “absent;” believers are either “in” or “out,” “saints” or “apostates.” This model is not organic allowing for growth, development, exploration; but rather mechanically static, like a light switch. Second, Kenny’s construction of faith requiring “the same degree of certainty as knowledge” implies

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another bifurcation. Simplifying the nineteenth-century’s intense and complex theological debates on the relationship of faith and reason, this formulation assumes that faith and knowledge are not only two different, categorically separate faculties with nothing in common, but also that these two areas of human life are opposed to one another, rivals in human decision-making, and so divided that any contact or collaboration would be seen as contamination.9 In sum, belief emerges as diametrically opposed to knowledge; devotion to skepticism; and faith to reason. Without further examining Kenny’s generalization that this account covers “almost all religious traditions” (McCoy 4), this section argues that such a conception of faith does not fit Coleridge’s thought and thus should not be taken as an interpretive guide to understanding what he meant by “poetic faith.” It outlines the ways in which the guiding distinction for Coleridge was not between faith and reason, but, perhaps unexpectedly, between faith and belief. Further, these two latter terms of faith and belief (again perhaps unexpectedly) corresponded to Coleridge’s reworked version of the Kantian categories of Reason and Understanding. As a result Coleridge saw “faith” and “knowledge” as involved not in a contest, but in a complementary interplay that elevated the whole human person. In this dynamic, “faith” and “reason” converge in a way that allows an individual to behold and “know” the fullness of reality. This faithful and reasonable beholding is the resource Coleridge offers for wrestling with the epistemological and aesthetic problems of his day. The fi rst element for understanding this alternative version of how to understand the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” is to recognize that Coleridge did not view its key terms of “faith” and “belief” as interchangeable synonyms. In fact, he held that to “desynonymise,” or to distinguishing between the nuanced meanings of commonly conflated concepts, was the “business of the philosopher” (PLects 1: 177).10 The distinct meanings and roles that he assigns to “faith” and “belief” in the salient 1817 Biographia Literaria passage can be parsed within the context of Coleridge’s sustained theological searching and his probing Biblical exegesis. In an 1808 notebook entry drawing on the Gospel of Mark, Coleridge quotes a father’s petition to Jesus on behalf of his ailing son: “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” (CN 3: 3353; Mark 9:24). The theology of the

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biblical prayer and Coleridge’s derivative notebook entry complicate the ordinary use of language about belief: Alas! my Heart seems of very truth palsy-stricken / It is deadalive, yet trembles ceaselessly. O mercy! O for the power to cry out for mercy from the inmost / That would be Redemption! Now I understand, now I feel the anguish of not feeling savingly the prayer—I believe! Lord help my unbelief! (CN 3: 3353) Oddly, Coleridge and the father seem to be in both a state of belief and its opposite state of unbelief. How can this be? On the one hand, “belief” concerns the premise that redemption and the power of prayer are truths. “Unbelief,” on the other hand, involves an inability to pray, to perform an action, to enter into a life or existence formed by that “belief.” The propositions of “belief” are held, but the father and Coleridge remain at a distance, somehow stagnant, or below some level of animate life, “palsystricken.” Coleridge himself noted the paradox surrounding this Biblical verse in an 1813 notebook entry in which he writes that its language expresses, or suggests, the “transcendency of religious Intuitions” by the “balancing of contradictions” (CN 3: 4183). When Coleridge revisits the Gospel passage again in an 1814 letter, his slight terminological adjustment clarifies how it is possible to have both belief and unbelief simultaneously. In a prayer included in the letter, Coleridge removes the apparent contradiction by adding the third term “faith”: I believe! Lord, help my Unbelief! Give me Faith but as a mustard Seed: & I shall remove this mountain! Faith! Faith! Faith! I believe—O give me Faith! O for my Redeemer’s sake give me Faith in my Redeemer! (CL 3.933: 499)11 The opposite of “unbelief” is not “belief,” as semantically demanded, but rather “faith.” Coleridge restates the phrase “help my unbelief” as “give me Faith!” “Faith” and its opposite “unbelief” differ in kind from “belief” and its opposite, which we can infer to be “disbelief.” Thus what may be called the creedal framework of Christianity—Christ as the Redeemer, the efficacy of prayer, the mercy of God—is the domain of belief. To believe is to assent to the coherence, reasonableness, and goodness of these doctrines; to

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disbelieve is to reject their validity. Faith lives and moves and has its being in those doctrines; unbelief fails to do so. Coleridge restates this distinction between “belief” and “faith,” so important in his earlier personal spiritual struggles, throughout his writings. In 1830 marginalia to the writings of John Donne, Coleridge defi nes “belief” as the “assent of the fancy and understanding to certain words and propositions” and emphasizes that it is distinct from the “act of Faith” (CM 2: 300).12 He complains that Donne “confounds Faith, essentially an act, the fundamental Work of the Spirit, with Belief” (CM 2: 300). Outlining his Biblical hermeneutics in “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,” he writes that the sky of his belief is “serene, unclouded by a doubt” and then pleads to God “that my Faith, that faith which works on the whole man, confi rming and conforming, were but in proportion to my Belief, to the full acquiescence of my Intellect and the deep Consent of my Conscience” (SWF 2: 1119–20). The passage makes clear that belief is not the whole of religious life. In a verse from the Epistle of James, even devils are believers who acknowledge the Christian picture of the universe: “Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble” (Jas. 2.18–19). Not atheists, the fallen angels believe in God, but they faithlessly defy the deity with an everlasting “no.” At the mention of God, the rebel angels tremble; their unbelief does not deny God’s existence, but does display their own unwillingness to respond to his lovability and sovereignty. Embedded within Christian belief is a demand for going beyond the process of mensuration, recognition, and evaluation associated with “belief” and “disbelief.” Yet comprehending the sought-after “faith,” rejected by Lucifer and desired by the forlorn father, was a harder philosophical and theological task. Attempting to describe this hard-won higher capacity or state that overcame “unbelief” and developed out of “belief” was an enduring quest for Coleridge that informed his 1820 “Essay on Faith,” a short 1820 piece “On St. Paul’s Defi nition of Faith,” his 1820s “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,” and a major portion of the fi rst section of his life’s intellectual work, the incomplete Opus Maximum. One of the consistent themes in Coleridge’s theorization of “faith” is that it involves the “whole man.” In other words, it

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is robustly holistic, going beyond any mere assent to doctrine, any membership in a religious organization, or any privatized, compartmentalized, or fragmentary aspect of experience. In the “Essay on Faith,” the width and breadth of his definition surpasses anything like cautionary “suspended disbelief”: Faith subsists in the Synthesis of the Reason and the Individual Will. By virtue of the latter, therefore, it must be an energy; and inasmuch as it relates to the Whole Moral Man, & is to be exerted in each and all of his constituent or incident faculties & tendencies, it must be a total, not partial, a continuous, not a desultory, or occasional, Energy; and by virtue of the Former, i.e. Reason, Faith must be a Light, a form of Knowing, a Beholding of Truth. (SWF 2: 844) “Total” and “continuous” as opposed to “partial, desultory, occasional,” this also exceeds the “conditional, tentative, and skeptical” account of faith offered in McCoy’s moderated “poetic faith.” Far from being a doctrinal system, “faith” is identified here as an “energy” and, later in the essay, a “Life” as well as the “Light of Men,” originating in the Logos, the “Word made Flesh” of St John’s Gospel (SWF 2: 844). Entailing an active, engaged, and transformative venture, faith is for Coleridge, as Basil Willey writes, “a living, existential act, a deliberate decision and not a dead mechanist acquiescence” (127). Providing illumination, life, and energy, this “faith” galvanizes all the faculties of the “Whole Moral Man.” David Jasper writes that for Coleridge, faith “employs man’s total capability of reason and will” (119–20). This holistic account contravenes Gallagher’s self-divided model of “ironic credulity,” in which faculties self-consciously testify against one another. Contrary to Kenny’s account of bifurcated opposition, this cooperative and synthetic relationship suggests that faith maintains a complex, dialectical accord with knowledge, at least within Coleridge’s theologically informed epistemology. Coleridge’s theological revision of the Kantian categories of “reason” and “understanding,” particularly in his influential 1825 Aids to Refl ection, is at the center of his system of thought and also informs his interpretation of “belief” and “faith.” Thomas Carlyle mocked Coleridge for offering up the distinction as the “sublime secret” to save the age (53): “By attending to the ‘reason’ of man, said

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Coleridge, and duly chaining-up the “understanding” of man: the Vernunft (Reason) and Verstand (Understanding) of the Germans, it all turned upon these, if you could well understand them,—which you couldn’t” (59). René Wellek goes further, criticizing Coleridge for molding disparate, contradictory theories together to produce a “philosophy of faith” from a German tradition skeptical of religion and for fi nding a “way out” of philosophical difficulties “in the love and faith of religion” (88). Apart from their dismissiveness, however, both these critiques are not incorrect in their account of Coleridge’s thought. Kant’s distinction, theologically remodeled, is both ubiquitous and panacean in Coleridge’s philosophy. For Coleridge, the faculty of the “understanding” organizes the mind’s sensory perceptions. It is discursive, arranging and rearranging phenomena, as well as comparing and classifying. Requiring sweat, effort, analysis, and investigation, this “discursive” mode is the most common form of human reflection, according to Raphael in book five of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Coleridge uses as an epigraph for chapter twelve of the Biographia Literaria (5.486–90).13 In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge presents the understanding as “judging according to Sense” (AR 215). Aquinas, building on Aristotle, labeled this part of the human intellect as the ratio (Pieper 11–14).14 At its most basic level, the understanding deals with “the world,” material reality, cause and effect, the naturata.15 For Coleridge, philosophers of the understanding include John Locke, William Paley, and Joseph Priestley. “Reason,” however, becomes for Coleridge an elevated, spiritual faculty. Derived from Kant’s practical reason, which corresponds to humanity’s free, moral will, “Reason” is transformed by the “sage of Highgate” into a faculty of supernatural vision that is not only the sphere of human will but also the source of religious intuitions foreign to the Kantian epistemology. It is effortless and receptive. For Milton, such “intuitive” insight is angelic. In the Thomistic and Aristotelian tradition, it is the intellectus, whose nondiscursive flashes of insight inform the vita contemplativa in every facet of existence from art to morality. The two faculties remain related, but in a hierarchy. The understanding is subordinate to reason and cannot say anything about reason’s truths; nor can claims of reason stand in contradiction to the foundation of the understanding. Understanding gives us information about the material world, but only reason governs moral decision and meaningful experience. In

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The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge writes, “The eye is not more inappropriate to sound than the mere understanding to the modes and laws of spiritual existence” (SM 68). The understanding says nothing about spiritual truths because it lacks the faculty to perceive them and the language to describe them. Therefore, any attacks on religion from a materialist standpoint, such as arguments impugning miracles, only beg the question. Spiritual truths are spiritually discerned. Just as the eye cannot testify to the beauty of a Beethoven symphony, the understanding cannot provide evidence of the truth of Christianity. Thus, Coleridge approves Kant’s seemingly skeptical project in Religion within the Bounds of Reason (1793). For Kant, the understanding was unable to prove anything about God. Crucially for Coleridge, it was also unable to disprove anything. James Boulger writes: “All the arguments of the deists, the Christian rationalists, the natural theologians, and the skeptics and Evidence-writers could at once be eliminated as having no essential value in regard to religious experience” (72). Indeed, Coleridge found this reductionism and misaligned form of inquiry at the heart of the age’s intellectual woes, which in turn either caused or misdiagnosed its social and political challenges. His theological defi nitions of the terms “reason” and “understanding” also mapped on to his defi nitions of “faith” and “belief.” Wellek again provides an insight, albeit with hostile intentions, when he writes that “Coleridge feels that he has fi nally cleared the ground, beaten the enemy and installed for ever the realm of Reason which is faith” (91). Coleridge does identify “reason” with faith in his exposition of the biblical claim that the just shall “live by Faith”16 in this 1816 passage from The Statesman’s Manual: We (that is, the human race) live by faith. Whatever we do or know, that in kind is different from the brute creation, has its origin in a determination of the reason to have faith and trust in itself. This, its fi rst act of faith is securely less than identical with its own being. Implicité, it is the Copula—it contains the possibility of every position, to which there exists any correspondence in reality. It is, therefore, the realizing principle, the spiritual substratum, of the whole complex body of truths. This primal act of faith is enunciated in the word, God: a faith not derived from experience, but its ground and source, and without which the fleeting chaos of facts would no more form

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experience, than the dust of the grave can of itself make a living man. The imperative form of inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself in all things purely rational and moral. (SM 18) By aligning “Faith” with the “form of reason itself,” Coleridge’s system continues to accrue attributes to this faculty, which should be seen as holistic, active, illuminating, intuitive, and elevated. In addition, this passage presents it as a “copula,” or a link, between experience and meaning. Faith conjoined with reason enables the swirl of data that emerge within experience to be organized into meaning. The relationship is one of dependence and contingency. Without “faith,” spirit melts away into “air, into thin air” and meaning “shall dissolve,” as in Prospero’s broken masque. By instead sustaining and constituting meaning and life, Coleridge asserts that this is an animating faculty, which gives life or spirit to the raw material of existence. As such, it mirrors the divine on the human level, just as the “Primary Imagination” is “repetition in the fi nite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infi nite I AM” (BL 1: 304). Writing in the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition, the German philosopher Josef Pieper calls such a faculty “at once a human and super-human condition” and cites Aristotle’s description of the contemplative faculty as evidence that “man cannot live this way insofar as he is man, but only insofar as something divine dwells in him” (36). Whether it is more proper to call this “supernatural” faculty “faith” or “reason” becomes irrelevant for Coleridge, because knowing becomes for him a way of living. More than just a means for acquiring or possessing knowledge, it represents a mode of being and beholding. Coleridge closes “Appendix C” of The Statesman’s Manual with the claim that “true religion” can elevate “Knowing into Being, which is at once the Science of Being, the Being and the Life of all genuine Science” (SM 93). In his note “On St. Paul’s Defi nition of Faith,” Coleridge stresses the “Identity of Act and Being” and argues that we should understand transcendence in light of this ascending ontic epistemology: “This is the great delusion of the fleshly Fancy, that we make Heaven a Having instead of a Being, a happy, instead of a blessed, State” (SWF 2: 846). In The Friend, an earthly version of this heavenly state occurs when reason and faith are coincident and reconciled:

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For alike present in all, it may be awakened, but it cannot be given. But let it not be supposed, that it is a sort of knowledge: No! it is a form of being, or indeed it is the only knowledge that truly is, and all other science is real only as far as it is symbolical of this. (1: 524) Since one cannot properly verbalize this existential knowledge, education cannot consist in passing along a discursive communication, just as passing along mere “beliefs” did not give Coleridge a life of faith. Rather, it consists in leading another into a similar state of consciousness. Thus, the educator, poet, or critic would speak only to awaken, stimulate, and inspire. At its culminating level, conveying “faith” or “reason” would enable another to see more fully, since, for Coleridge, this “knowing as being” takes the form of an “intuitive Beholding of Truth in its eternal and immutable Source” (CN 3: 3592). In some cases Coleridge represents this as the function of reason as “the mind’s eye” or “the Spiritual Eye” (Friend 1: 157; SWF 2: 847). In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge writes that reason is a “direct Aspect of Truth, an inward Beholding” (AR 224). At other times, as in the “Essay on Faith,” such beholding is a function of both faith and reason: “Reason, Faith must be a Light, a form of Knowing, a Beholding of Truth” (SWF 2: 844). In other cases, faith alone governs the vision: That state of the Will and its affections, which considered in its own essence or substance, uncorrupted from within and untroubled from without, constitutes the beatitude which we now hope for—the same state, considered in its present relations, as struggling with temptations from without and its own imperfections from within, is Faith. (SWF 2: 845) Regardless of any minor shifts in terminology, the “intuitive beholding of truth” operates in the same manner. Coleridge frequently uses “intuition” (ostensibly deriving from Hooker or Milton), to mean a simple, immediate perception.17 Coleridge makes an effort to defi ne intuition in the Logic from the Latin “intueor” meaning “to look at or on a subject, to have it present to the sight and then by a wider use, present to the senses generally, whether the outward or the inward senses” (151). Pieper again identifies

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this version of “intellectual vision,” one that sees the “human knowing process” as akin to a receptive “act of sense perception,” as a common thread in ancient and medieval philosophy (9). It also coheres with Coleridge’s description of the primary imagination as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception” (BL 1: 304). In Coleridge’s defi nition in Aids to Refl ection, he claims that reason “is much nearer to Sense than to Understanding” since the understanding is discursive, based on language, causal explanation, and description. Reason has “a similar relation to the Intelligible or Spiritual, as sense has to the Material or Phenomenal” (AR 223–4). In other words, what Coleridge called “Higher Reason” or “Faith” enables the perception or the beholding of meaning and sense that is above and beyond the mere experience encountered by the “bodily eye.” Such “intellectual vision” gains “evidence of meaning and order” through an experience, an insight of truth and reality that would not otherwise be available (SWF 2: 845).18 Without “faith,” the same experience, the same encounter, would appear to provide only a “baseless fabric” of lifeless, meaningless, fragmented data. This contingent epistemology, which is at the heart of Coleridge’s Christian Kantianism, is shaped by St Augustine’s constitutive account of faith and knowledge. For Coleridge, belief organizes and intellectually examines doctrines and tenets, either dismissing or accepting them. Faith supersedes belief, actualizing the entire person in a life centered on a knowing that is a way of being. Nevertheless, Coleridge acknowledges that the “copula” or link between the two faculties presents both a theoretical and existential problem. For Coleridge, what can be known is dependent upon the state and orientation of the knower. He writes in Aids to Refl ection of the way that “facts” are contingent: Suppose (what is at least possible) that the facts should be consequent on the belief, it is clear that without belief the materials, on which the understanding is to exert itself, would be wanting. (AR 85) This is a crucial idea for Coleridge, but it is also so complex that he asks of his own reader a “suspension of disbelief”—here described as a supposal followed by a parenthetical plea—in order to think through his model of thinking. Coleridge’s premise is that

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without a well-formed set of beliefs, aspects of experience will not present themselves as facts. The twentieth-century philosopher E. F. Schumacher describes this as being “adequate” to an experience or having an intellectual map that can illuminate an encounter with the world (39–49). For instance, walking the streets of Rome for the average middle-class American will produce an experience and set of “facts” that is “wanting” when compared to the facts presented to an architectural historian, to Shelley faithfully and fondly imagining the burial of his deceased friend Keats in the eternal city, or even a literary pilgrim heeding Shelley’s evocative command in Adonais (1821) to “go thou to Rome” and see how “ages, empires and religions there / Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought” (424–5.48). The difficulty lies in the relationship of beliefs and their formation. Enriched experience is dependent upon such a wellformed set of beliefs, but those enriched beliefs themselves grow from enriched experience. Yet such adequate experience is not available until cultivated through those adequate beliefs. Coleridge illustrates the process with an agricultural metaphor, “Belief is the seed, received into the will, of which the Understanding or Knowledge is the Flower, and the thing believed is the fruit” (AR 194). The fi nal fruit, it should be added, in turn produces the initial seed. In Schumacher’s terms, a city cannot be known without a map, but a map cannot be made without knowledge of a city. This is, as Coleridge acknowledges within the Biographia Literaria, a “seeming argumentum in circulo,” pertaining to any complex idea “not presentable under the forms of Time and Space.” According to Coleridge, such circularity will stagnate in attempts “to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding what we can only know by the act of becoming” (BL 2: 244), but it can be overcome with the aid of faith. A transformed “knowing” can come through suspending the understanding and proceeding with an investment of faith that can, for Coleridge, bring “wanting” facts to fuller fruition, turning a vicious circular argument into a virtuous cycle, a sustainably organic way of knowing and being. Coleridge’s fiduciary epistemology derives from St Augustine and his interpretation of Isaiah 7.9 (Barth, Coleridge 31–3). In a notebook entry from 1810, Coleridge writes, “Believe, says St. Augustine, & most profoundly too—and thou wilt receive an intellectual conviction, (perception of its rationality) as the reward of thy Faith” (CN 3: 3888). Coleridge

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is referring to several passages of St Augustine’s sermons on the Gospel of St John, two of which he quotes in the original Latin: So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that understanding may be the reward of faith. (CN 2: 3133; AR 8)19 and I believed and therefore I understood. (BL 2: 244)20 Coleridge and St Augustine quote Isaiah in support of this position, “Unless ye believe (saith the Prophet) ye cannot understand” (AR 194). 21 The propaedeutic “belief” of St Augustine corresponds to Coleridge’s defi nition of “faith” as the active investment of the entire person that catalyzes the process of knowing. Under this model, effective “blockage” of knowledge and experiential evidence can occur when approaching a question, a text, or an experience without such investment, which St Augustine conveys in a metaphor involving sight: Some one lights a lamp. For example, that lamp, as far as regards the little flame which shines there, that fi re has light in itself. But your eyes which, when the lamp was not there, were inactive and saw nothing, now they, too, have light, but not in themselves. Accordingly, if they turn away from the lamp, they are darkened; if they turn toward it, they are enlightened. (Tractates 22.10.1) The flame, which enables sight, projects light regardless of whether any eyes look upon it. If the will averts the eyes, sight becomes impossible. However, a turning toward the light in faith promises to complete the insights of the rational understanding. The hope is that a fully enlightened experience may be tautegorically gained within that light. 22 All these meanings from across Coleridge’s thought converge on his choice of the word “faith” to describe our approach to aesthetic illusions in “poetic faith.” His “faith” entails a robust commitment that engages the whole person. This engagement is not just a

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confessional belonging or even a doctrinal assent, but an entry into a way of being that illumines and animates. This approach to life transforms experience as it gives order, coherence, and meaning to the person’s encounter with the world. It is a beautiful and beautymaking power without which the world falls into inanity, but with which reality reveals a greater fullness. The constitutive vision of faith is a powerful form of beholding, that is not in confl ict with knowledge, but identifiable with reason in its highest form. While McCoy may argue that the modifier “poetic” redacts this theological account of “faith,” this reading seems unlikely given Coleridge’s overriding tendency to synthesize and unify, rather than to create opposition. Even the secondary imagination, which Coleridge labels “poetic,” differs only “in degree” not “in kind” from the infi nitude of the primary imagination (BL 1: 304). McCoy’s proposed division of faith from the theological also seems discordant with Coleridge’s far from secularizing willingness to proclaim in 1809 that “God, the Soul, eternal Truth, & c. are the objects of Reason; but they are themselves reason” or in 1825 that “Mysteries are Reason, Reason in its highest form of Self-affi rmation” (Friend 1: 156; AR 9). Yet one may wish to argue that McCoy’s qualification should be made, even if Coleridge himself did not make it. In other words, Coleridge’s complex account of “faith” could perpetuate irrational fanaticism, only disguised in what Carlyle derided as a “Kantean haze-world” (57). This objection underlies Wellek’s assertion that Coleridge ultimately advocates “the breakdown of human Intelligence in order to substitute pure Faith” (91). This critique, however, is unfair to Coleridge’s account of “faith,” which remains in dialogue with the “understanding” and rational belief. Coleridge explicitly rejects the position attributed to him by Wellek as “Ultra-fidianism,” which holds that rationality has no concourse with faith’s convictions regarding morality or knowledge (AR 208). Such antinomianism or solafidianism would produce the fanatical rejection of morality and evidence that McCoy critiques in Othello and Leontes. For Coleridge, intuitions of truth must extend beyond the bounds of the understanding, but they cannot contradict the fi ndings of moral philosophy and scientific reasoning. In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge writes of the “union of Religion and Morality” and argues that the intuitions of Faith “are not at war with the reasoning Faculty, and that if they do not run on the same Line (or Radius) with the Understanding, yet

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neither do they cut or cross it” (AR 77). The understanding plays an important critical role in Coleridge’s thought, rejecting any intuitions that are discordant with the human faculties, “repugnant to the dictates of Conscience, and irreconcilable with the interests of Morality” (AR 170). It also probes for incoherence because even though Coleridge’s “faith” deals in supersensible areas such as meaning and spirit, this higher “Reason” cannot “exist without Understanding; nor does it or can it manifest itself but in and through the understanding” (Friend 1: 156). Faith is not an independent faculty, free to dream idealistic fantasies in unreal lands of chimera and cherubim. In an incarnational way, its intuitions work in and through the physical domain of the understanding. In the “Essay on Faith” Coleridge paraphrases Thomas À Kempis, writing that “lower nature is taken up into and made to partake of the higher” (SWF 2: 842). 23 This parallels the relationship of belief and faith in Coleridge’s reworking of the father’s Biblical prayer. The realm of belief is not rejected or ignored, but rather completed in the realization of a vital faith. Nor does Coleridge grant the “spiritual” intuitions of faith (or “Higher Reason”) irrevocable certitude and unwavering obedience, but rather he constantly calls for them to be examined and questioned for rational coherence with morality and knowledge. The next section examines how Coleridge’s dialectical approach to “faith” and “belief” informs the meaning of those two key theological terms in “the willing suspension of disbelief, which constitutes poetic faith.”

“There are more things, Horatio”: Coleridge’s model of reading Coleridge’s use of the terms “faith” and “belief” are two central shoots that emerge from the branching rhizome system that is his thinking. The nature of Coleridge’s thought has several broad implications for interpreting the model of reading implied in the Biographia Literaria. First, unlike McCoy’s turn to Coleridge to remedy “conflating religious and theatrical faith” in recent Shakespeare scholarship (ix), the previous section has argued that Coleridge’s thinking has a phototropic tendency toward the theological and that “poetic faith” needs to be more like,

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perhaps even congruent with, its religious analogue in order to be fully realized. Coleridge’s Biblical hermeneutics will thus prove particularly helpful for understanding his literary theory of “poetic faith.” Second, since Coleridge’s distinct accounts of “faith” and “belief” are based on other dual distinctions in his thought, most prominently “reason” and “understanding,” his critical conception in the Biographia Literaria should likewise be seen as having two distinct parts: fi rst, the “willing suspension of disbelief” and, second, “poetic faith.” Finally, Coleridge’s hermeneutic model will be derived not only from the meaning of those two parts, but also from their relationship and interaction. With “belief” as its key term, the “willing suspension of disbelief,” centers on the reader’s faculty of understanding. The understanding has as its domain the materiality of an artwork. At the most basic level, this could entail the paper, ink, straight and curved lines that comprise an edition of Homer or the scenery and script of King Lear. This would even include Coleridge’s inscribed “autopergameme,” or “self-parchment”—the scrap of his own peeling skin on which Coleridge wrote a poem with the inimitable couplet: “The Ink his own Blood and the Parchment his Skin – / This from ’s Leg, and the other from ’s razor-snipt chin.”24 More broadly, the understanding can examine the inventory of less unusual “lifeless things” within the sonnet “Ozymandias”: “trunkless legs of stone,” a “shattered visage,” the “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer.” This faculty thus does not disregard the artwork itself and considers the plot, characters, tropes, setting, and stagecraft, possibly even taking a measure of doubting delight, a chance “to temporarily indulge imaginative play” as Gallagher has argued in “The Rise of Fictionality” (347). Beyond the blazon of the fallen tyrant, the ratiocinative understanding would also attend to the next level of materiality, not only a work’s place in literary history—such as Shelley’s literary and archeological sources—but also its role as an artifact in a broader material culture, one involving political, social, and economic contest and change, what McGann calls its “ideology and its various concrete forms” (148) and Eagleton its function within “the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state” (Literary Theory 200). The understanding and its “beliefs” about these material elements correspond with the focus of the “critical vantage,” which takes the audience member away from aesthetic experience and the wizardly

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thrall of Ozymandias or Oz. The understanding can also situate the work and what it represents within established systems of morality, governance, economics, history, and science, and then interrogate the place of the work within those systems. This would encompass Gallagher and Greenblatt’s historical research into and discourse analysis of the “mutual embeddedness of art and history” and the place of the “singular, the specific, and the individual” within an “explosive mix of nationalism, anthropology, poetry, theology, and hermeneutics” (7, 8, 4–5). Critical understanding could also entail the type of “political criticism” advocated in Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, which would parse a work’s often hidden ideology, its “link or nexus between discourses and power” (210), and unveil its play for power, its message to the “mighty” to “despair.” Coleridge’s thought takes beliefs seriously and does not dismiss the understanding or, by extension, any of these modes of criticism. His philosophy does not discredit science or history or materialist criticism by severing the spiritual from the physical or by disconnecting the ideology within art or religion from rational investigation. 25 All these forms of critical inquiry and the knowledge they produce could be sanctioned, approved, and maintained under the literary theory of the Biographia Literaria. If this approbation holds, however, why then does Coleridge call for them to be “suspended” in the encounter with an aesthetic illusion in the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment”? The Coleridgean position would be that these inquiries are not wrong in themselves, but rather incomplete. If the limited scope of the understanding defi nes the aesthetic experience, that aesthetic experience will not be fully realized nor will those modes of inquiry be adequate even to their own objectives. The inquiry of the understanding into questions of “belief” or “disbelief” therefore needs to be deferred, not abandoned but held in check temporarily. He sees some way in which the work of the understanding and its need to draw conclusive positions can interfere, at least initially, with encountering an artistic illusion. The note of warning is similar to that sounded by Wendell Berry in his 1984 essay “The Loss of the University,” which recalls the academy’s mission to make “a good—that is, a fully developed—human being” and literature’s contribution “to the needs of human and natural neighborhoods” (80, 81). In particular, he points to what Coleridge would label the “mere understanding” as curtailing our ability “to understand

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fully what a tree is” and literature’s accrued memory of “all that trees have meant and been” (80). “We destroy those memories by reducing trees to facts,” Berry writes in a mode congruent with Wordsworth or Coleridge, “by thinking of tree as a mere word, or by treating our memory of trees as ‘cultural history’” (80). The understanding’s questions of “belief” and “disbelief” are not problematic because they would yield “valueless” aesthetic experiences or wrong linguistic or cultural accounts. Rather, the danger is that such preliminary fi ndings would be taken for the whole or become encompassing distractions from further inquiry, as they do for Horatio who never proceeds beyond this level, never hears, and thus remains oddly marginal to, objectively distanced from, Hamlet’s life and Shakespeare’s drama. Berry too worries that “a kind of shame among teachers of literature and other ‘humanities’ that their truths are not objectively provable as are the truths of science” has created “an overwhelming impulse” to reduce literature to the more quantifiable terms of what Coleridge calls the “understanding” (92). Across his oeuvre and especially in his theological commentary, Coleridge shows concern for two nascent forms of such “misbelieving” that tend to emerge when the understanding operates alone: mere beliefs and anti-beliefs. Mere belief produces a reduced form of knowledge because it preemptively limits the perceptual field. For Coleridge, even the physical workings of the eye are not simple, nor divorced from metaphysics or theology. His defi nition of the “willing suspension of disbelief” is followed by an intriguing Biblical allusion that argues Wordsworth’s poems awakened men from the “lethargy of custom” in which “we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand” (BL 2: 7). Following St Augustine, Coleridge argues that even the senses, the foundations of empiricism, do not operate independently but require faith in order to provide full evidence. The verse “we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not” suggests this complexity and interdependence. 26 This phrase appears frequently in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and New. St Paul cites the law and the prophets to describe how the majority heard Christ’s teachings and parables but did not respond (Rom. 11.8). 27 In St John’s Gospel, Christ quotes Isaiah to explain how people did not believe after seeing, but not really “seeing,” miracles (John 12.40). 28 In St Mark’s Gospel, after feeding

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four-thousand people with seven loaves of bread and refusing to perform another miracle for the Pharisees, Christ says to his perplexed disciples, “Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?” (Mark 8.18). 29 These passages do not denounce “blindness” per se. Christ performs separate miracles for healing the blind, and the Old Testament often refers to physical blindness as “dim eyes,” as in the cases of Isaac, Israel, and Eli (Gen. 27.1; Gen. 48.10; and 1 Sam. 3.2). “Having eyes, yet seeing not” implies that one may have a fully functional, physically unimpaired sensory organ and yet not perceive correctly. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites had not “eyes that saw” or “ears that heard” before God’s covenant with Moses. Prior to the covenant, they were surely able to see material objects with their sensory organs. The formation of the covenant fulfi lled, completed, and perfected their senses. Faith elevated their physical nature, enabling them to “see” the supernatural in and through the natural world. This idea illuminates a strange, disturbing passage in Aids to Refl ection when Coleridge asks whether a description of the eye as a combination of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements is what “we mean by an Eye, by our Body?” (AR 396). A macabre injunction to the reader or would-be anatomist to detach the eye from the body follows: Look steadily at it—as it might lie on the Marble Slab of a dissecting Room. Say it were the Eye of a Murderer, a Bellingham: or the Eye of a murdered Patriot, a Sidney!—Behold it, handle it, with its various accompaniments or constituent parts, of Tendon, Ligament, Membrane, Blood-vessel, Gland, Humors; its Nerves of Sense, of Sensation, and of Motion. Alas! All these names, like that of the Organ itself, are so many Anachronisms, figures of Speech, to express that which has been: as when the Guide points with his fi nger to a heap of Stones, and tells the Traveller, “That is Babylon, or Persepolis.”—Is this cold Jelly “the light of the Body?” (AR 396) The fi nal phrase recalls what might be Shakespeare’s most gruesome line, Cornwall’s declaration “out vile jelly” as he scrapes out the eye socket of his fellow collaborator Edmund’s father, the elderly Duke of Gloucester (King Lear III.vii.86). This suggests that a type of violence is facilitated by “Minimi-Fidianism,”

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which disallows any consideration of meaning or life beyond the material, whether it be the animation of the eye or the relational bonds to a father. The “mere belief” of “Minimi-Fidianism” goes about “picking and choosing” doctrines acceptable to the understanding and interpreting them according to the “negative” state of mind (AR 214), resulting in the introduction of “some high doctrinal text” with the reductive words: “It only means so and so! ” (SM 44). The minimi-fidianist takes the partial fi ndings of the understanding for complete truth, extrapolates a truncated world picture from these fragments, acts according to this reduced reality, and thus renders himself unable to “see” beyond this condition. Anti-belief results in a similar, actively chosen, occlusion. In The Friend, Coleridge takes the reader inside the mind of Luther wrestling with the Bible so that it becomes “nothing but words” (1: 142). The determined reformer refuses to accept any interpretation not amenable to his theological and political position: See! there has the sly spirit of apostacy worked-in a phrase, which favours the doctrine of purgatory, the intercession of Saints, or the efficacy of Prayers for the Dead. And what is worst of all, the interpretation is plausible. The original Hebrew might be forced into this meaning: and no other meaning seems to lie in it, none to hover above it in the heights of Allegory, none to lurk beneath it even in the depths of Cabala! This is the work of the Tempter! it is a cloud of darkness conjured up between the truth of the sacred letters and the eyes of the understanding, by the malice of the evil one, and for a trial of his faith! Must he then at length confess, must he subscribe the name of Luther to an Exposition which consecrates a weapon for the hand of the idolatrous Hierarchy? Never! never! (1: 141) The personal aggression of Luther blocks the communication, summoning up an impenetrable “cloud of darkness” between the reader and the text. If this critiques a radical, vituperative Protestantism failing to engage the text, Coleridge also found Roman Catholicism producing its own version of obscuring anti-beliefs under “Papal darkness” (1:62). Attributing too much transcendence to the text, the “understandings of men” become “so darkened and their consciences so lethargic” that the “truths”

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of the Gospel are not recognized (1: 62).30 Whether because of aggressive enthusiasm or authoritarian superstition, these antibeliefs never bridge the gap between reader and text. The common problem of hermeneutics founded on mere belief or anti-belief is that their focus precludes a full experience of reality and a proper assessment of any experience of art or nature. “In Fears in Solitude,” Coleridge describes a self-blinded “owlet” as symbolizing a particular form of French “atheism”: Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious Sun in Heaven, Cries out, “Where is it?” (PW 1.1.175: 472.83–7) Beyond the sectarian insult, which could have equally been made against a faith-based fowl with more polite wings, is a more important point about the way a predetermined “belief” preempts an inquiry, or more specifically a reading. Here the “book of nature” will not be read nor its theological and scientific implications considered because of prejudicial action that has prematurely curtailed access to an experience. Any assessment of the sun’s presence, like St Augustine’s lamp, is impossible because of the prevenient position of the viewer. In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge discusses such prejudice that thwarts the gathering of experience and evidence and writes of the necessity of preserving a receptive mind: But both for myself and my Pupil, and in behalf of all rational Inquiry, I would demand that the Decision should not be such, in itself or in its effects, as would prevent our becoming acquainted with the most important of these Facts; nay, such as would, for the mind of the Decider, preclude their very existence. (85) The vocabulary is crucial. Coleridge speaks of a prejudice “precluding” and “preventing” an “acquaintance” or encounter that will provide facts. With this preventive attitude, these dropped eyelids, this aversion to light, inquiry or education cannot be completed. In The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge makes the case that hermeneutic reconnoiters made in willingly presumptive

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disbelief will effectively stultify any reading experience, particularly of sacred texts: I request that to the wilful neglect of those outward ministrations of the word which all Englishman have the privilege of attending, the reader will add the setting at nought likewise of those inward means of grace, without which the language of the Scriptures, in the most faithful translation and in the purest and plainest English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead language: a sun-dial by moonlight. (SM 57) Approached without the investment of preparation or sympathy, the letter will be dead, killed by a mis-positioned reader, who, like the owlet, has no access to what the sun might otherwise illuminate. No manipulations of the understanding, such as providing an accurate, plain translation, or a fuller context will overcome the obloquy caused by the premeditations of the understanding itself. The “willing suspension of disbelief” then is the temporary relaxing of the commands of the understanding, whose domain is the physical and the material. By settling on an incomplete picture of the world, a trust in the understanding alone will yield a skeptical predisposition that will preclude fuller, greater experiences. Deferring disbelief, suspending this skeptical prejudice to which McCoy retreats, is the fi rst, necessary step in approaching the unknown, be it theological, philosophic, or aesthetic. For Coleridge, however, even more is demanded. Out of this preliminary stasis must proceed the advance McCoy initially seemed to describe, an investment of faith, “poetic faith,” which acts holistically with heart, mind, and soul, as if believing in the world of the work. With a gift of self to the work and author, it goes beyond weak commitments, lethargic meandering, mere tolerance, “going along.” Faith serves as the copula, enabling the elevation of the understanding into reason to take place. For Coleridge, faith as reason is also a culmination, a seeing with the eyes of “poetic faith” that enables aesthetic experience and realizes a principle, which he felt was undergirding the Kantian critique, that in “all things worth knowing our knowledge is in exact proportion to our faith” (CN 4: 4611). This culmination, according to the Biographia, represents a proper encounter with an aesthetic illusion:

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That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affi rmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. (BL 2: 134) Thomas McFarland connects Coleridge’s use of “negative” here with Keats’s “negative capability” (Shapes 119–20). For Keats, “negative” implies a state of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (1: 193). The poet remains “capable” in the face of this uncertain state of negation. Likewise, for Coleridge, the reader may have “poetic faith” without the understanding resolving “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” Keats, of course, had Coleridge in mind when complaining about “irritable reaching after fact & reason,” but Coleridge’s literary theory neither retreats to the reduced certainties of the understanding nor abandons experience or the aesthetic. His approach in “poetic faith” to both truth and to the aesthetic is existential, a sense of “fact” that is not recorded data, but an experience: “How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge, may fi nally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact” (BL 1: 241–2). Reciting sections of Hamlet’s graveyard speech or comprehending in detail the socioeconomic or philosophic Elizabethan world picture does not entail “knowing” Hamlet for Coleridge. This is to understand the play. As Berry writes in “Loss of the University”: “We will study, record, analyze, criticize, and appreciate. But we will not believe; we will not, in the full sense, know” (92–3). Hamlet can only be known while being watched. The “knowing,” in its fullest sense, comes through the experience of the play. The deeper the experience, the deeper the knowledge. In arguing about a work, these experiences under poetic faith are “facts” just as the intuitive insights of reason are facts. Aesthetic experience provides data, substantial evidence, that is as valid as the evidence of the understanding, though only accessible if understanding has been deferred and an act of poetic faith made and sustained. “Poetic faith” allows for an aesthetic experience of “intuitively beholding” a work as within a dramatic model of reading in which audience members actively engage all their faculties to fully enter

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into its experience. He uses the image of the telescope to illustrate the enhancing, enabling, constitutive effect of a predisposition of “poetic faith.” In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge quotes Jeremy Taylor: “By the eye of Reason through the telescope of Faith, i.e. Revelation, we may see what without this telescope we could never have known to exist” (AR 341). Coleridge also deploys it in the 1818 Philosophical Lectures: Now what the telescope is to the eye, just that, faith, that is the energies of our moral feelings, are to the reason. Reason is the eye, and faith (all the moral anticipation) the telescope. (PLects 1: 377) The fiduciary attentiveness of “poetic faith” makes available information and evidence, through the sensory, of which we would otherwise remain unaware. A complete epistemology, Pieper has argued, needs “intellectual vision” that knows by “simply looking at something, gazing at it, ‘taking it in’” (12, 9). In his Shakespeare criticism, Coleridge describes his sense of the intellectual vision as most readily approximating dramatic experience: “Thus, Claude imitates a Landscape at Sunset, but as a Picture; while a Forest-scene is not presented to the Audience as a Picture, but as a Forest” (LitLects 1808–19 1: 133). A pictorial representation is to be looked at, but a dramatic one beheld. The audience member, while watching or beholding the play, experiences the forest as if the forest were real. The implications are even greater. The audience member enacts the play. Twigs break beneath her feet. The wind blowing among the cedars whips through her hair. She overhears the quips and musings of the clown and the shepherd. Berry writes of this immersive experience, “When we are in the work, we simply know that great Odysseus has come home, that Dante is in the presence of the celestial rose, that Cordelia, though her father carries her in his arms, is dead” (“Loss” 94). The audience member “understandably beholds.” Just as she must enter into the play, must experientially become, so too must she make an existential leap into poetry. The Biographia Literaria seamlessly applies a dramatic hermeneutic to poetics. The “intuitive beholding” of dramatic truth accomplished under poetic faith is given as a hermeneutic model for reading and understanding the Lyrical

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Ballads and specifically The Ancient Mariner. The “suspension of disbelief,” the deferral of understanding, gives way to a dramatic theory of poetic faith that would allow for a “deeply involved” and “sympathetic” literary encounter (McGann 11). Contrary to the isolation of mere belief or anti-belief, Coleridge’s hermeneutical approach would also sympathetically seek to put “poetic faith” in the author. In a notebook entry from 1808, Coleridge writes of a phenomenological sense of “Halfness.” We long to reach beyond the limits of our own ego, to express our thoughts in an appropriate symbol, and to fi nd an auditor through that symbol. For Coleridge, confiding in his private notebook, writing emanates from this search for wholeness that would derive from community and communion across the letter: Hence I deduce the habit, I have most unconsciously formed, of writing my inmost thoughts—I have not a soul on earth to whom I can reveal them—and yet “I am not a God, that I should stand alone” and therefore to you, my passive, yet sole kind, friends I reveal them. (CN 3: 3325) The writer supposes a friend, in the hope that there is an unseen reader who will understand. Just as the author must proceed with faith in his reader, the reader must have faith in the author, though he may also be hidden or unseen—the “all Shakespeare & nothing Shakespeare” (CN 2: 2086). In a 1804 notebook entry, Coleridge writes that “no Book itself teaches a language in the first instance, but having by symp.[athy] of Soul learnt it we then understand the Book—the Deus minor in his work” (CN 2: 2326). Between the equally dangerous straits of bellicosity and obeisance toward the “Book,” Coleridge advocates a genial hermeneutic grounded in “the subject of Sympathy.” In “The Principles of Genial Criticism,” Coleridge writes that his object is “to enable the spectator to judge in the same spirit in which the Artist produced” (SWF 1: 360). Under “poetic faith,” the reader precedes with sympathy, trusting in a “Deus minor,” an author behind the work, whose “halfness” mirrors our own and calls for the reader’s spirit of cooperation, his willingness to create “part even of the Form.” In The Friend, Coleridge describes a process of “co-exertion” (1: 62) appealing

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to the image of the Chamois-hunter who leads the reader into mountainous heights: Our guide will, indeed, take us the shortest way, will save us many a wearisome and perilous wandering, and warn us of many a mock road that had formerly led himself to the brink of chasms and precipices, or at best in an idle circle to the spot from whence we started. (1: 55) Without the guiding spirit of the author, attempts to establish communion or sympathy will either rush into peril like Luther or remain in a solipsism, like “the groans of a wounded Lion in his solitary Den, or the howl of a Dog with his eyes on the Moon” (AR 86). This reverence for the author, however, does not debilitate the reader because the guide “cannot carry us on his shoulders: we must strain our own sinews, as he has strained his; and make fi rm footing on the smooth rock for ourselves, by the blood of toil from our own feet” (Friend 1: 55). The reader must continually act, exert, and assert. Coleridge thus appeals to his own reader as a “fellow-labourer” (Friend 1: 21), suggesting a co-dependent assent and ascent by author and reader. The critic too may be added to this effort, playing a role that is ancillary and preparatory to the dramatic unfolding of the aesthetic experience. Using the incarnation as a model, Coleridge writes that the materials of the understanding cannot contradict spiritual truths; they must, instead, be elevated into the spiritual. Likewise, the materials of a work must not strain against their aesthetic truths. The “stuff” of the work must be drawn up into and integrated with aesthetic experience. The critic can play a negative role by pointing out inconsistency between the materials and purported “aesthetic truths,” to demonstrate that certain “higher” experiences do not, like false visions or theological abstracts, embody themselves in the physical structure of the work. The critic may also play a propaedeutic role, like Paulina. If aesthetic experience exceeds discursive description, the critic cannot overcome the limits of mere belief or anti-beliefs by simply communicating the aesthetic “facts.” For Coleridge, aesthetic knowledge is experiential knowledge gained through a beholding and a becoming. The critic can help enhance this vision, like a telescope or a “glass” that enables the reception of “more light in a

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wider field of vision” (SM 70). The critic could lead the reader to an experience of the work by rousing or awakening them from their own sleep, by highlighting the detailed workings of a text, by unsettling readers’ assumptions that hold them back from engaging the text, by delineating how the materials of the understanding ranging from plot devices to socioeconomic structure inform the dramatic progression of the work, or by refi ning the aesthetic responses of audience members. All of these would be critical interventions that do not dis-animate the aesthetic encounter, as did the worrying of Prospero, the fear of Marcellus, or the nuanced circumspection of Horatio. Instead critical guidance would serve Hamlet’s advance, they would help him see why and how to welcome the strange ghost. This aesthetic approach hopes to give the reader access to the experience described by Coleridge in the conclusion to Aids to Refl ection: “‘My words,’ said Christ, ‘are Spirit: and they (i.e., the spiritual powers expressed by them) are Truth’; i.e. very Being” (AR 407). The promise of “poetic faith” is that its actively holistic hermeneutic aided by a gracious, cooperative criticism would access the words of the spirit that young Hamlet and the audience had previously been denied, one that cannot be described but only experienced in an existential act of following and beholding. With its welcome into a way of being, “poetic faith” would also promise to constitute aesthetic “goods” of literature, what Gallagher and Greenblatt want to defend in Practicing New Historicism as “aesthetic pleasures” or “the deep gratification that draws us in the fi rst place to the study of literature and art” (4, 9). Gallagher, Greenblatt, and McCoy all recognize such robust, rich, and fully engaged experiences of a text, but their methodological limits do not allow their pursuit consistently. Furthermore, “poetic faith” would also promise to deliver, or at least to attempt delivery of, the humanistic “goods” manifestly desired in the critical writings of McGann and Eagleton. By harnessing what Berry calls “the power of songs and stories to affect life” (“Loss” 79), this fiduciary approach would allow Trelawney to reach into the fi re after his departed friend Shelley’s “unconsumed heart,” a desire for friendship across time and mortality at the margins of McGann’s writing. Its holistic engagement of all the faculties that culminates in a transformative beholding and becoming would also foster McGann’s remaining hope for “genuine change” amid his critique of the romantic ideology (13). Such dramatic engagement would

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also speak to Eagleton’s desire for “pleasure, enjoyment” and for “the potentially transformative effects of discourse” that are sublimated because of the pressing need for “political criticism” (Literary Theory 212). It would also offer new forms of political hope in its ability to access “utopian” imaginative revisions of the world and to promote new, alternative social formations in the communal cooperatives formed among authors, readers, and critics. As such, “poetic faith” should not be seen in opposition to either Eagleton’s “political criticism” or the New Historicism of McGann, Greenblatt, or Gallagher. Rather, reading with “poetic faith” offers the opportunity for a more aesthetically vibrant materialist criticism and a more materially grounded, culturally aware formalism. It would do so by considering how the materials of the understanding are elevated into and participate in the dramatic unfolding of the aesthetic experience. Further, it would consider the aesthetic “facts” that emerge from “seeing” a literary work with “poetic faith” as cultural data, as phenomena that are part of, rather than opposed to, history. Such an integrated critical approach, which combines robust dramatic experience with cultural awareness, can be seen in works such as Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory, which closes with a powerful, personal meditation on Prospero’s epilogue in The Tempest. After the crash of the wizard’s pageantry and his willful magical manipulations, The Tempest ends with Prospero’s address to the audience that may resonate with the elusive personal voice of the retiring Shakespeare himself: Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. (Ep. 5–13) Greenblatt sees a transfer of power from the intercessory prayer of religion to the celebratory applause of the secularized stage (261).

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Yet the epilogue also resonates as a moment of what Coleridge calls “poetic faith,” a conception which draws on, rather than necessarily supersedes, its theological counterpart. As such, it dramatizes literature’s service to the community envisioned by Berry as a bearing back to reality of experience and insight from an artistic work: “This carrying back is not specialist work but an act generally human, though only properly humbled and quieted humans can do it. It is an act that at once enlarges and shapes, frees and limits us” (“Loss” 80). Prospero has been reformed within the play; “humbled and quieted” he petitions rather than commands. Having liberated his servants, he requests liberation so that he may leave his “bare island” to return to the parochial limits of his “human and natural” neighborhood. That “home” is where the transformed audience will return as well. At the beginning of the play, they sat passively at the sight of the shipwreck, caught between the wilting pathos of Miranda and the strategic indifference of Prospero. Now they have the opportunity to act as what Berry calls “responsible heirs and members of human culture” by responding in a fi nal act of genial collaboration that will inform their ways of being when they rise the morrow morn. Yet even under Greenblatt’s personal reading, Coleridge’s faithful hermeneutic, and Berry’s communal framework, this wonderful passage still presents diffi cult, unresolved questions about the power and ideology of art. Prospero has been chastened and subdued in this epilogue as the wizard readily admits: “Now my charms are all overthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own, / Which is most faint” (Ep. 1–2). The word “charm” has an etymological root in the Latin carmen, or song (OED). So this disavowal actually disperses aesthetic power, acknowledging the end of his art’s capacity to enrapture. So too, if we hear Shakespeare uttering this speech, does this represent a metatheatrical moment, like the wizard of Oz emerging from behind his pyrotechnic screen. In other words, because the dramatic illusion is broken, or at least cracked, in this epilogue, some of the harder questions about “poetic faith” may not present themselves as readily. However, would “poetic faith” compromise the audience, if Prospero were still overthrowing rather than having been overthrown? Would his books, his “brave utensils,” still be fearful? (III.ii.96). Does

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“poetic faith” provide suffi cient protection or is McCoy right to revert prudently to a “more moderate and less apocalyptic” position, a distance that is safer but less revelatory? (15). Does the more enthralled commitment of “poetic faith” (even when rightly understood as the operation of higher reason rather than antinomian fanaticism) still come with too much vulnerability? Does not the warier aesthetic experience of the “willing suspension of disbelief” track a safer course? Berry, for one, does not seem altogether troubled by these questions. While this chapter has relied on his insights to explain elements of Coleridge’s “poetic faith,” Berry himself berates the romantic poet for causing rather than resolving the problem. For the poet and activist, the “willings suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” is a “sentence full of quakes and tremors” and the concept itself represents the “great distraction behind the modern fate of literature” (“Loss” 93). His critique, of course, is aimed at what this book has identified as the common understanding of Coleridge’s phrase, a tolerant “going along” that distances literature from reality and permits a reader, in Berry’s words, “to remain, in an important sense, outside the work” (94). This chapter has implied that when Berry calls for an aesthetic investment and immersion that is “long past the possibility of any debate with ourselves about whether or not to be willing to believe,” he approximates what Coleridge intended by “poetic faith” (94). But Berry’s robust account of the imagination even claims that “a proper reading of Homer will result in some manner of belief in his gods” and praises the “triumphant return” of the “pagan gods” in the novel That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, who was able to grant them a “certain authority and . . . a certain assent” because his imagination “was not encumbered with any such clinical apparatus as the willing suspension of disbelief” (95). Yet even Berry’s qualifying adjective “certain” indicates some reasonable uneasiness. Should not the reanimation of Zeus or Hera—those gods from what Simone Weil called Homer’s “poem of force”—give us pause? (45). What if the returning gods are Nelson, or Wellington, or Ozymandias? And what if they, as Horatio warned, tempt us toward the flood or to the dreadful summit of the cliff? Is there then, as Berry does not seem to allow, a remaining role for “disbelief” even under an aesthetic approach of “poetic faith?”

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Notes 1 Steiner’s unusual phrase “elect stranger” seems to have been used in some forms of medieval courtly language. The deeper reference, however, is to the fi rst chapter of 1 Peter in which St Peter addresses his fellow Christians as “elect strangers” or chosen pilgrims. The passage also contains reference to redeemed souls “tested by fi re” (1 Pet. 1.7), the most important Biblical citation for the doctrine of purgatory from which the spirit of Hamlet’s father claims to proceed. 2 For two recent overviews and interventions about the role of religion in recent Shakespeare scholarship, see Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion and Kaufman’s Religion Around Shakespeare. 3 For an extended treatment of the different philosophical implications of the two “primary words” of “It” and “Thou,” see Buber: “When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation” (12). 4 For a discussion of T. E. Hulme’s denunciation of romanticism as “spilt religion” and C. S. Lewis’s response, see Tomko, “Religion,” 341. 5 For Christian imagery in “Ozymandias,” see Edgecomb. 6 For Coleridge’s role in the intellectual development of fi rst Unitarianism and then Tractarianism, see Knight and Mason 57–60 and 93. For the influence of Coleridge on religious thinkers and writers in the Victorian era broadly and Maurice and Newman respectively, see Prickett, Neville 83–6, and Rule. For Hazlitt’s critique of the “hectic criss-crossing prose” in Coleridge’s religious works, see Paulin 195 and 187–204. 7 For Coleridge on the significant methodological difference between “division” and “distinction” see BL 2.11 and PLects on “it being the business of philosophy ever to distinguish without unnaturally dividing” (1: 376). 8 For a small sample of the various and often competing studies of Coleridge’s views on the imagination, see the collections on Coleridge’s Imagination edited by Gravil, Newlyn, and Roe as well as Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination Today, edited by Gallant. 9 For the fi ne-grained arguments about the various way of interpreting the relationship of faith and reason in nineteenthcentury theology, see Fitzer. For doubt and faith in the early modern period, see Monta 117–24.

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10 For desynonymy as a Coleridgean philosophic method, see Perry 12–13. For a discussion that recognizes the desynonymization of “suspension of disbelief” and “poetic faith” as “a very important step forward” in Coleridge’s theory of aesthetic illusion, see Burwick, Illusion and the Drama, 215. 11 For a parallel petitionary distinction echoing the prayer from Mark, see the following 1805 notebook entry: “This I now feel with all its needful evidence, of the Understanding: would to God, my spirit were made conform thereto . . . O that this Conviction may work upon me and in me / and that my mind may be made up as to the character of Jesus, and of historical Christianity, as clearly as it is of the Logos and intellectual or spiritual Christianity. . . .” (CN 2: 2448). 12 For Coleridge’s sense that Donne’s theological confusion between faith and belief is symptomatic of a philosophic confusion between reason and understanding, see CM 2: 277. 13 For the significance of this Miltonic passage to Coleridge’s thought, see Jonathan Wordsworth 37–9: . . . whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive: discourse Is oftest yours [humanity’s], the latter most is ours, [angels’] Differing but in degree, of kind the same. (5.486–90) 14 This section is indebted to Barth’s chapter on “The Nature of Faith” in Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (15–52), which remains the clearest account of Coleridge’s synthesis of Kant, Augustine, and Aquinas, as well as to Barth’s discussion of faith, symbol, and sacrament in The Symbolic Imagination (31–46). 15 For Coleridge’s description of the understanding, see SM 69 (“Of the discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification for the purpose of comparing and arranging phenomena, the Characteristic is Clearness without Depth. It contemplates the unity of things in their limits only, and is consequently a knowledge of superficies without substance”) and AR 223 (“1. Understanding is discursive. 2. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other Faculty as its ultimate Authority. 3 Understanding is the Faculty of Reflection”). 16 For St Paul’s use of the prophetic phrase that the “just shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2.4), see Romans. 1.17, Galatians 3.11, and Hebrews 10.38.

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17 For Coleridge’s paraphrase of Hooker as saying “an intuition that is a direct and immediate beholding or presentation of an object to the mind thro’ the senses or the imagination,” see SWF 1: 369. 18 For faith as “evidence,” see Hebrews 11.1: “Faith is the Substance of Things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” 19 E. H. Coleridge’s translation, as given by the editor John Beer. Coleridge quotes the latin: “Sic accipte, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet praecedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei praemium.” 20 St Augustine’s original reads “crede ut intelligas” or “believe in order that you may understand” in Engell and Bate’s translation. Coleridge takes the original imperative and renders it in the past tense: “Credidi, ideóque intellexi.” 21 For further citations, see also AR 85 and SM 97. St Augustine quotes Isaiah in Tractate 27.7.1. The KJV translates as “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established” (Isa.7.9). 22 For Coleridge’s etymological use of “enlightenment,” see AR 35. For Coleridge on the eye as a “tautegorical” symbol of vision, see CN 4: 4711. For a discussion of this concept as sacramental consubstantiality, see Barth’s synopsis: “a symbol, for Coleridge, always partakes of the reality it represents” (Symbolic Imagination, 33). For the expression of such a tautegorical understanding, see the C. S. Lewis memorial in poets’ corner of Westminster Abbey, which originally appeared in Lewis’s essay “Is Theology Poetry?”: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else” (140). 23 For the claims by Thomas À Kempis that “the highest cannot stand without the lowest,” see Imitation of Christ, 82. 24 For Coleridge’s unique poem “An Autograph on an Autopergameme,” see PW 1.2.680: 1133–4. 25 It must be noted that Coleridge’s career did not always follow the logic of his own philosophy. For a discussion of his embarrassed attempt to disconnect his early poem “Fire, Famine and Slaughter” (PW 1.1.167) from its revolutionary religious and political positions, see Tomko, British Romanticism, 45–7. 26 For Coleridge’s use of the phrase in his letters, see CL 6.1670: 810. 27 For St Paul’s citations, see Deuteronomy 29.4 (“Yet the Lord hath not given you a heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day”) and Isaiah 29.10 (“For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered”).

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28 For the Old Testament allusion, see Isaiah 6.10 (“Make the heart of this people fat, and make their eyes heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed”). 29 For additional Biblical usages, see “They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat” (Ps. 115.5–7); “They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes they have, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; neither is their any breath in their mouths” (Ps. 135.16–17); They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see; and their hearts, that they cannot understand’ (Isa. 44.18); “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not” (Jer. 5.21); and “Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a rebellious house” (Ezek. 12.2). 30 For an additional critique by Coleridge of how the “Church of Superstition” has “never ceased to avow the profoundest reverence for the Scriptures themselves, and what it forbids its vassals to ascertain, it not only permits, but commands them to take for granted,” see SM 6.

CHAPTER THREE

The willing resumption of disbelief This inquiry into the “willing suspension of disbelief” as a persistent critical category began with justified ambivalence over literature’s capacity for psychagogia, or the quasi-magical guidance of souls and spirits associated with Prospero. On the one hand, the books of the wizard presented a threat, a power to overawe an individual’s autonomy before the grandiloquent reanimating words of an Ozymandias or the pyrotechnical advertising of an Oz. On the other hand, such spells also presented a singular chance for something more, a uniquely unexpected opening into personal transformation and communal formation sketched in Gandalf’s strokes upon the door of the barrenly bourgeois and comfortably cul-de-sac-ed Bilbo. The difficulty for literary theory was that an absorptive openness to the catalytic power of literature exposed a reader to the imperiousness of a misleading ideologue, but a critical vantage that removed such vulnerability also dissolved the necessary illusions that promised human goods available through art. The “willing suspension of disbelief” has consistently, and most recently in New Historicist theory, attempted to bridge this gulf by offering an engaged aesthetic experience, but one safely curtailed by a guarded gaze that “goes along” with aesthetic tolerance. Yet critics such as Susannah Monta as well as writers such as Wendell Berry and J. R. R. Tolkien have seen this interpretation of Coleridge’s concept as a middling compromise that is unsatisfactory on all fronts, a static dual double negative

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that neither liberates nor enchants. The previous chapter proposed that taking Coleridge’s theological terminology seriously, rather than vestigially, suggests that the “willing suspension of disbelief” should yield to “poetic faith,” a more robust but still reasonable investment in the aesthetic encounter that potentially provides a way beyond the seeming ultimatum presented by the polarizing Prospero. While The Tempest ’s interdependent epilogue illustrated the potential of such committed and insightful “poetic faith” in the preceding chapter, Berry has offered an even more expansive example in The Unsettling of America (1977), his wide-ranging political, agricultural, sociological, and anthropological exploration of modern sadness, aggression, despair, and cupidity in the United States. Witnessing to art’s role in mitigating problems that are as much existential as ecological, he turns to an episode of King Lear in which the exiled, but loyal son, Edgar, comes to the aid of his father, the once hubristic and naïve Earl of Gloucester, whose eyes have been gouged out by the ruthless regime supported by his duplicitous son, Edmund (IV.i, vi). Playing a “madman and beggar” (IV.i.30), Edgar pretends to lead the suicidal Gloucester over the cliffs of Dover, but then, following a staged drop of only a foot or two, switches roles to a passerby who guides his fallen father’s interpretation of the simulated event. “Thy life’s a miracle,” he assures the stunned nobleman (IV.vi.55). Playing this new character, Edgar explains that the supposed madman on the edge above had been an evil spirit, “some fiend” with a “thousand noses,” and that Gloucester should turn to “free and patient thoughts” after the “clearest gods” had saved his life from the bad spirit and the lethal plunge (IV.vi.69–80). Berry sees this choreographed interaction as a “rite of death and rebirth” through whose “curative power” Gloucester “escapes the unhuman conditions of godly pride and fiendish despair and dies smilingly in the truly human estate” (98–9). Yet Berry also points out that this “ritual healing” is in fact a “play-within-a-play,” a dramatic performance by Edgar that brings his audience member into the performance so that he “sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors” (98–9). And, as such, such redemptive outcomes are contingent on “poetic faith,” or what the Shakespeare scholar David Scott Kastan calls our “will to believe” as a “condition of

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the plays’ success on the page or in the theater” (1). What Berry identifies as “Edgar’s strategy to save his father from false feeling” would not have worked without the blinded Gloucester’s full conviction in his disguised son’s stagecraft, an illusion produced through a persuasively detailed and poetic rendering of the disorienting sounds and dizzying sights seen from the supposed precipice (99; IV.vi.12–24). Just as Leontes had to believe fully that he beheld a petrine image of Hermione and not just a stilled actor, Gloucester needed to be convinced that he was on the “very brim” of the cliff (IV.i.74). One can only imagine the Earl’s reaction if he had stepped through this simulation with ironic credulity, affected tolerance, or some other “more limited, more congenial, and safer alternative” (McCoy 5). At best, the patronizing absurdity of an illusion that exploits his blindness might simply have left the Earl unchanged with “no way” (IV.i.18). At worst, it might have plunged him deeper into “his suffering and the despair that is its result” (Berry 99). Approaching this “play” merely with the “willing suspension of disbelief” certainly would not have reawakened Gloucester to “the proper defi nition and place of human beings within the order of Creation” (Berry 97). In addition to the transformative potential of literature, Berry’s meditation also illustrates its ability to cross ideological divides. After interpreting Gloucester’s “play-within-the-play,” he focuses on a mad suicide careening through the sacred streetscape of Hart Crane’s gasping apostrophe to the Brooklyn Bridge: Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momentarily, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. (“To Brooklyn Bridge” 2–3.17–20) Berry’s agrarian world view at the end of the twentieth century could not be farther removed from Crane’s apotheotic vision of the megalopolis in The Bridge (1930), a “symphonic” poem for the “Machine Age” that Crane’s biographer Paul Mariani has described as a visionary attempt to reverse the “downward spiral” of Western Civilization and “in the process revitalize the entire country” (115, 127, 116). Yet Berry’s invested reading of The Bridge and its “unifying symbol” enables him not only

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to understand but also to see into Crane’s celebration of our “becoming creators, ourselves, of a mechanical creation by which we felt ourselves greatly magnified” (Berry 102, 100). Coleridge would see the insight of Berry—a self-described mad farmer—into the mindset of Crane—the urban visionary—as the result of a faith that is both “the commencement of Experience, and the condition of all other experience” (SWF 1: 836). Aesthetic reception, or the beholding of a work through poetic faith, is predicated on an active gift of self, a cooperative beholding with the Other whose humane opening of new perspectives C. S. Lewis celebrated in An Experiment in Criticism (1961) with the lone regret that “the brutes cannot write books” (140). With its active engagement and vulnerable receptivity, this Coleridgean entrustment promises to provide a deeper vision of a work otherwise unavailable and, despite a measure of initial distrust, to enable exchange across ideological divides, as it does for Berry. Without this concomitant experience, Berry’s fi nal move of inverting this image—of seeing the bridge not as a Promethean masterpiece but a monument of Tartarus, and of hearing the counterpointed echo of Gloucester’s restored gratitude in the lonely despair of Crane’s lunatic—makes his critique of contemporary “blindness” and “estrangement” all the more credible (102). Yet these countervailing scenes from the heights raise anew several questions about aesthetic power that reiterate Horatio’s challenge: “What if it tempt you toward the flood, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff?” (I.iv.69–70). When following “it” with “poetic faith,” can the reader distinguish between the madman and the genius, the destructive bedlamite and the beneficent thaumaturge? Does Coleridge’s theologically informed approach to art allow for the discerning of spirits—between angel and fiend, between son and sarcastic jester? Or does his call for fidelity make him as vulnerable as an Othello or a Leontes? And if there is some capacity for critique, when and how does that occur? When does the “blind man” come to see, to step, and to speak differently from his guide? How does this disengagement occur, its opposition begin? In sum, if “poetic faith” overcomes the willing suspension of disbelief’s limitation of aesthetic power, does it ignore the very real threat of ideological co-optation? This chapter will argue that Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” does

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provide a model for continued rational query and challenge even as a full investment in the aesthetic illusion is made. This derives not from the middling reserve of the “willing suspension of disbelief” or some modified or renamed form thereof, but from the dialectical interaction between the two faculties of disbelief and poetic faith. This critical method is, again, implicit, and understood through Coleridge’s theologically nuanced interplay between faith and doubt. The fi rst section will, therefore, outline the way in which critique does not come from a persistent skepticism that holds back the reader or audience member during the aesthetic experience, but rather from the end of disbelief’s suspension and thus, in that moment, a disablement of poetic faith. This critical turn that de-constitutes poetic faith and frees the reader from a malevolent influence, I will label the “willing resumption of disbelief” and trace its operation in Coleridge’s review of Charles Maturin’s play Bertam later in the Biographia Literaria. This polemic review, however, raises further questions about critical “bad faith,” and the ability of the “willing resumption of disbelief,” understood as a critical methodology, to resolve this fundamental problem of literary theory—the seemingly impossible choice between the desert of the critical vantage and the thrall before the tyrant’s statue. The result will return us to Tolkien’s own literary theory that wrestles with the legacy of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” but that goes beyond literary theory in its resistance to power and maintenance of enchantment.

“Experimentative faith”—Danger, doubting, and Bertram In his book A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (2014), Kastan makes a cautiously agnostic argument about what Shakespeare’s works and biography can reveal to us about the playwright’s own religious beliefs. In doing so, he makes a secondary, more decisive, point that a Coleridgean “poetic faith,” which can and should be distinguished from theological faith, was and is discernible in the staging or reading of the plays. In a formulation that mirrors Richard McCoy’s, Kastan stresses that the injunction in The Winter’s Tale to “awake your faith”

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(V.iii.95) comes from “Paulina not Paul” and “is clearly something different than . . . saving faith” (11). When Kastan asserts that, in encountering Shakespeare, what is “demanded from us is neither belief in God nor trust in His word, but only ‘that willing suspension of disbelief’ in the fictions that Shakespeare has created” (11), he relies on Coleridge’s words to make a strong division between aesthetic and religious faith.1 Unlike McCoy, he does not explicitly rely upon an antagonistic “either/or” between a dangerously fundamentalist version of faith and a safely humane form of reason—an opposition incompatible with Coleridge’s broader thought. Nor does A Will to Believe portray the aesthetic engagement as a diluted form of religiosity, as did Abrams. Rather than moderation, Kastan actually seems to intensify his religious rhetoric to describe Paulina’s, and Shakespeare’s, sense of performative faith: Paulina’s directive stipulates the terms of our covenant with Shakespeare, to which we assent as we enter the theater or as we open a playbook: he will create believable characters, and we will respond with our will to believe in what he has created. (11) To the theological terms “faith,” “belief,” and “creation,” Kastan has added the Biblical term “covenant.” “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant,” God pronounces to Abram in Genesis, “to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee” (Gen. 17.7). This divine covenant echoes the post-diluvian pact with Noah (Gen. 9), fi nds reconfi rmation with Moses in Exodus (Exod. 24.7–8; 34.10), and becomes the basis for the new covenant in Hebrews (Heb. 8–12). Given this lineage, such a “poetic covenant” with Paulina or Shakespeare would seem to imply a level of mutual commitment as strong as “poetic faith.” These sacred covenants had transformed individuals (the elected Abram is renamed Abraham thereafter), provided ethical guidance (the mitzvah of circumcision and the ten commandments follow), constituted communities or nations (for the peoples of both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), and created a bond of fidelity that is multigenerational and indeed promised as “everlasting,” (an irrevocability acknowledged by St Paul in

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Romans 11.29). In the “Essay on Faith,” this call for enduring loyalty or “faithfulness” is also a constituent part of Coleridge’s understanding of faith: The fi rst or most indefi nite sense of Faith is Fidelity: then Fidelity under previous Contract or moral Obligation. In this sense Faith is Fëalty. Thirdly, it rises into Fëalty to a rightful Superior. Faith is Allegiance —the duty of a faithful Subject to a Legitimate Governor. Fourthly: it is Allegiance in active service, Fidelity to the liege Lord under the circumstances and amid the temptations of Usurpation, Rebellion, and intestine Discord. (SWF 1: 843) In addition to the action of the entire moral man and the synthesis of his reason and will, a sustained self-subordination is needed for the culmination of faith. Such untiring dedication would be at the heart, then, of a Coleridgean “poetic faith” and provide the basis for Kastan’s own allegiance to his informed and credible judgment about the Shakespeare’s character, often in the face of sophisticated and initially compelling accounts that argue otherwise. Kastan’s separation of piety and poetry grows out of the life-long scholar’s loyal sensibility that bristles against recent attempts to make Shakespeare “sectarian or sacramental” (11), or to frame him as a religious writer like Milton or Spenser (4). Kastan’s covenantal framework, however, raises questions about following a “rightful superior,” questions that occupied both St Augustine and Coleridge. In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge writes that philosophy is both the “servant and pioneer” of faith (188), a phrase René Wellek cites as an example of Coleridge’s pusillanimous, simplistic religiosity (130). Yet the phrase is more complicated than its piety suggests. A pioneer sets out alone, establishing a new way apart from authority. At the same time, however, philosophy must be an unquestioning servant, whose faithfulness to an established authority would undermine any independence. This ancillary trust works well for Gloucester when he gives his arm to Edgar (IV.i.77), but what if he had instead stumbled upon Edmund with his Ozymandian dreams. Or what if “poor Tom” had actually been driven mad by “five fiends” (IV.i.57)? “If madness were simply bad, all would be fi ne,” Socrates argues in The Phaedrus. “But as it is, the greatest of all good things come to us through madness,

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provided that the madness is divinely given” (24). St Augustine likewise wrote of the ambivalent potential of faithful discipleship that must be open to seduction but wary of destruction: For if to seduce is to deceive, neither was Christ a seducer nor were his Apostles, nor ought any Christian be a seducer; but if to seduce is to lead someone from one position to another by persuasion, it must be asked from what and to what. If from evil to good, the seducer is good; if from good to evil, the seducer is evil. Therefore, on this side, where men are seduced from evil to good, may all of us both be called and be seducers! (29.1.1) St Augustine asserts that there is a form of “persuasion” that differs in kind from deception, but the distinction depends on its end. Yet the seduced cannot initially determine whether the seducer’s intention is beneficent or malevolent; the madness, “divinely given” or bedlamite; the guide, a fiend or friend. He will not ultimately be able to judge until after being seduced. In the face of such uncertainty, how can Coleridge call for “faith” in reading, for example, the work of the cobbler and mystic Jakob Böhme? One of Coleridge’s favorite writers, Böhme claims in The Aurora (c.1612) to write “from the Impulse of the Spirit” (32), but this is not an objective or transcendent spirit: Neither did I ascend into Heaven, and behold all the Works and Creatures of God; but the same Heaven is revealed in my Spirit, so that I know in the Spirit the Works and Creatures of God. (21) If St Paul is right, as Coleridge affi rms in Aids to Refl ection, that “spiritual things are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2.14; AR 77), then one can only receive Böhme’s message by being overwhelmed with the spirit, his spirit: If thou holdest on in thy Earnestness, and will not give over, then will this Fire come suddenly upon thee, like Lightning, and shine into thee, and then thou wilt well experience that which I have here wrote, and wilt easily believe that which is in my Book. (54)

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To obtain this “Fire” one must read with singleness of Heart, a desire for the Holy Spirit, and a singular hope in God. Without this preliminary disposition and without this effacing fi re, Böhme’s book would appear to be written in “dead language” and the reader would be unable to access its meaning. With it, the promise is not just comprehension of the material, but experience of it, leading to easy belief. Böhme’s own personality, however, looms large as he locates this spirit, which is able to scan God and His works, within himself. His own ends are not clear. Nor does there appear to be a method to determine those ends short of acquiescing to his tempestuous personality. Kastan’s “poetic covenant” may be with Shakespeare and not an antinomian enthusiast, but Jon Mee, in Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (2003), has forcefully argued that literary analogues of such spirited approaches also raised the threat of dangerous religious enthusiasm (17–19). How can “poetic faith” be separated from its radical religious counterpart in the field meetings of the early Methodists, the messianic messages of Joanna Southcott, or the vulgar (from a Coleridgean perspective) king-killing Christianity of the revolutionary Citizen Lee? These strident romantic-era prophets drew on the sectarian energies from Shakespeare’s time that also turned the world “upside down” in the seventeenth century. 2 What is to guarantee that this receptive self is not carried away by what Blake might praise as Paulina’s fi rm persuasion (38), 3 losing the power of rational decision to a demagogue or cultural authority that could be either benign or destructive? If dangerous enthusiasm threatens Coleridge’s “poetic faith,” it would also raise questions about Kastan’s “covenant.” For both literary critics, however, the nature of the hermeneutic commitment provides the crucial safeguard against the “lightning” of a Böhme or a Prospero. Kastan’s covenant is formed by “assent as we enter the theater or as we open a playbook” (11). Unlike its Biblical analogues, Kastan’s “poetic faith” was not always already established, but generated in response to the performance or the reading. Such framed temporality is also key to Catherine Gallagher’s argument that the novel allowed for “intense engagement” because it represented a “controlled situation” (348) or “protective enclosure” that could “cordon off imaginary yielding from any dangerous consequences” (347). When the revels are ended, so too presumably is the covenant at the theater exit or the

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bookshelf. Coleridge’s literary theory shares this presumption in the often-elided phrase “for the moment” that follows the “willing suspension of disbelief.” The reader does surrender himself and pledge his loyalty to the author, but it is only “for the moment.” The temporary nature of the experience of literature allows the reader to emerge from a work with an understanding of what it is like to believe in an artist’s picture of the world without relinquishing his own freedom, as well as the freedom of generations forever after. Reading Milton initially requires suspending disbelief in Puritanism and reading Lucretius holds in check any intellectual aversion to atomism. Poetic faith then allows full entrance into the world picture of typological testing-grounds of Puritanism and the swerving immanence of classical physicalism. We become Puritans or atomists to gain that type of experience. Echoing this position, Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism advocates an approach to literature in which the reader can “become a thousand men and yet remain” himself (141). Under Lewis’s method, one can have access to the otherwise unavailable lived experience of a philosophical position: “Who in his ordinary senses would try to decide between the claims of materialism and theism by reading Lucretius and Dante? But who in his literary senses would not delightedly learn from them a great deal about what it is like to be a materialist or a theist?” (85–6). The return to “our ordinary senses,” or the willing resumption of disbelief, is precipitated by the fi nite—the bordered and the bound, the cordoned and enclosed, the acted and the staged—nature of the aesthetic experience. “When the lute is broken,” Shelley wrote, “Sweet tones are remembered not” (“When the lamp” 590). Such limitations would seem to distinguish literature from theology and reading from discipleship. Such a temporary and fi nite “poetic covenant” or “poetic faith” structurally and institutionally causes a “willing resumption of disbelief” that re-imposes reality and fosters a reasoned assessment of the ideological positions encountered in the aesthetic. Yet while this is an important element of Coleridge’s literary theory, there are several difficulties presented by a “poetic faith” primarily understood as safely transitory, including two ways that would curtail the potency of literature. First, a reader or viewer’s consciousness of an upcoming “resumption of disbelief” risks trivializing the aesthetic illusion. With the prospect of re-emergent disbelief so close at hand and recalled by a glance at the watch or a

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text on the smartphone, this form of the “resumption of disbelief” would suffer from limitations parallel to the initiatory “willing suspension of disbelief.” Namely, the insulated removal described by Gallagher or the distracted tolerance satirized by The Onion and critiqued by Tolkien would be a more likely state of mind for the viewer than McCoy’s “intensely absorbed” faith in Shakespeare that “moves beyond skeptical disbelief and delusional credulity” (17) or Kastan’s vowing “to believe in” what Shakespeare “has created” (11). As such, a response with the “willing resumption of disbelief” in sight would be inadequate to the hermeneutic call of Böhme or Paulina. Second, this foreclosed engagement risks relegating the aesthetic to its own world of “meres”: mere faith, mere fantasy, mere magic, or mere feeling. If understood as a dimension bracketed by time and space from the rest of social and physical reality, this isolation would replicate McCoy’s bifurcation of faith and reason, a division between the illusory aesthetic and the rational world, between mere food for thought and serious deliberation. Such a short-lived and circumscribed aesthetic dimension is more readily dismissed as irrelevant to the “real world” and exacerbates the dilemma of justifying the role of literature—as did Richards’s reformulations of the “willing suspension of disbelief”—within a world where all efficacious truth claims are ceded to natural science and technology.4 Paradoxically, however, such a segmented fideistic realm, which relies only on a concluding “willing resumption of disbelief” or “return to the senses,” could also license the worst form of unchecked ideological hegemony. Enclosing the world of the play or the book dismisses moral or political concerns as belonging to the “other world” of reason, reality, and history, and thus sanctions a form of aesthetic antinomianism. This underestimates the influence of the aesthetic to corrupt, infl ame, or prejudice in ways that would not be readily contained within the pit or the library. Rather than simply dissolving as Prospero claimed, the effect of some spirits could stain, fester, and grow in power after a performance. “Music, when soft voices die,” Shelley also wrote, “Vibrates in the memory” (“Memory” 469). And the daunting message of Ozymandias threatens to return even after his statue has been shattered, scattered, and broken. It is also not difficult to imagine other aesthetic experiences that should be immediately disbelieved, an illusion that should

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be broken hastily before it proceeds to conclusion. The Seattle Times editorial columnist Sharon Pian Chan recently complained that the lasting impression of seeing white actors in “yellowface” during a revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s orientalist farce Mikado “opens old wounds and resurrects pejorative stereotypes” and was “wrong for Seattle, wrong for this country and wrong for this century.” There are numerous Shakespearean “plays-withinplays” in which the “willing resumption of disbelief” during the performance would have been ethically and politically beneficial, if not essential. Gloucester might have done well witnessing and sympathetically reacting to Edmund’s lacrimose soliloquy on behalf of all marginalized bastards, but believing his illegitimate son’s rehearsed lies about Edgar’s supposed plot of usurpation extends the play’s tragic consequences (I.ii.1–140). Othello’s “resumption of disbelief” before Iago’s “double knavery” might have prevented the culminating sexual violence that McCoy forcefully describes in Faith in Shakespeare (I.iii.395; 108–12). “Othello’s belief not jealousy”; Coleridge puzzled out in his notes, “forced upon him by Iago—and such as any man would and must feel who had believed of Iago as Othello” (Lects 1808–19 1: 554). A disruptive doubt to interrupt the suspicious “entertainment” of Leontes may also have alleviated the need for annealing and propitiatory aesthetic rituals in The Winter Tale’s (I.ii.118). For all these reasons, an understanding of the “willing resumption of disbelief” that is based on art’s temporary limits seems a necessary, but not sufficient, element in an adequate account of a Coleridgean literary theory of poetic faith. Some stories should be stopped. Coleridge’s theology suggests that a continuing pursuit of truth, therefore, must also accompany both poetic and religious faith. Since he does not see faith and reason as functioning exclusively but rather concomitantly, entering into a world view through an aesthetic experience need not entail the risk that occurs under the domineering enthusiastic influence of a Böhme. Proceeding with a collaborative dialectic between faith and reason, Coleridge champions an “experimentative” approach that, despite uncertainty, actively proceeds with inquiry in a spirit of faith. In Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge responds to a hypothetical interlocutor who asks “How can I comprehend this?” and “How is this to be proved?”:

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To the fi rst question I should answer: Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living Process. To the second: Try it. (AR 202) Coleridge’s response that Christianity is a life that can only be understood by becoming a Christian may seem obscurantist or coercive at fi rst glance, but the injunction to “try it” indicates the need for a “trial,” a proceeding in search of truth and a verdict rather than a simple submission.5 For Coleridge, trying Christianity remains rational and so does the reading process. In the preface to Aids to Refl ection, Coleridge writes: Now without a certain portion of gratuitous and (as it were) experimentative faith in the Writer, a Reader will scarcely give that degree of continued attention, without which no didactic Work worth reading can be read to any wise or profitable purpose. (AR 9) “Experimentative” seems to be a Coleridgean neologism, but the OED records a 1670 usage of the word “experimentate,” meaning “to make an experiment.” The reader or inquirer must proceed as if he had faith in the writer.6 He is willing to entertain propositions rather than immediately rejecting them as not fully proven. The reader will walk with the writer as far as possible, attempting to comprehend as much as possible. Without a provisional faith, any inquiry—be it part of a didactic work or a set of religious or anti-religious beliefs—will be incomplete, lacking all available evidence. We thus will not be able either to confirm or to deny it. The entire time, however, this remains an experiment in two senses: first, as previously discussed, the trial is temporary rather than a full-fledged submission, and second, its end is the discovery of truth. The goal of such conditional faith is thus not a Pyhrronic or antinomian limbo. Faith still seeks understanding (or fides quaerens intellectum in the words of St Anselm), even if an initial “suspension” of understanding (or what St Augustine calls the preliminary need to “lay aside doubt and defer understanding”) was needed for the experiment to take place. This continued pursuit of truth and understanding within the life of faith is one of the central themes in Coleridge’s theology. It represents the faithful “inquiry” in his “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit.” In the twenty-fifth aphorism of Aids to Refl ection,

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Coleridge identifies the persistent dialectic of faith and reason as the preeminent characteristic of his spirituality: He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. (AR 107) Coleridge asserts that humanity does have a moral sense that expresses itself in the conscience. One must love Christianity, but that allegiance not only can, but must, be continually judged according to truth. Likewise, aphorism 24, “worthy to be framed and hung up in the library of every theological student” (AR 106), sees the persistent capability of doubting and active inquiry following on from a deferral of understanding and a life of faith. Otherwise, faith risks intellectual stagnation and a fall into the merely phatic: Where there is a great deal of smoke, and no clear flame, it argues much moisture in the matter, yet it witnesseth that certainly that there is fi re there; and therefore dubious questioning is much better evidence, than that senseless deadness which most take for believing. Men that know nothing in sciences, have no doubts. He never truly believed, who was not made fi rst sensible and convinced of unbelief. (106–7) This is not the prejudicial and preventive “doubting” of Coleridge’s skeptical owlet. Nor is it the gullible cowering before Böhme or Ozymandias. Nor is it a reductive opposition between faith and reason that pits one against the other. Rather, it is a recognition of the complex and nuanced dialectical dance between faith and understanding, between reason and religion, that is necessary not only for a good believer, but also for a good thinker or reader: Never be afraid to doubt, if only you have the disposition to believe, and doubt in order that you may end in believing the Truth. (AR 106–7) Doubting, for Coleridge, should not be autonomous, but purposive and teleological in two ways. First, doubting can be part of an active engagement of the whole person that prevents a complacent state of

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acquiescent belief or disbelief. Not to strive is not to know. Even the blinded Gloucester, willfully following a madman, challenges the veracity of his leap’s setting and the voice of his gibbering guide. Second, Coleridgean doubting differs from the brand of classical skepticism that is derived from the writings of Sextus Empiricus and that seeks to “suspend judgment” so as to leave the mind in an intellectual repose that neither confi rms nor denies any dogma. This type of doubting, Coleridge asserts, is disingenuous. One may either doubt for the sake of believing or for the sake of ultimately disbelieving, to avow or disavow, but a middle state of suspended judgment is excluded as an end in itself. In an 1809 notebook entry, Coleridge writes, “The most errant Sceptic doubts not for doubting sake; but if he be honest, for the sake of arriving at some standing spot” (CN 3: 3592).7 What implications does this reciprocal interplay of faith and doubt hold for Coleridge’s literary theory? On the one hand, disbelief is initially suspended so that poetic faith can fully see and experience the vision of the work, even when it originates from a differing political or philosophical position. In St Augustine or St Anselm’s formulation, we believe in order to understand. When the understanding can confi rm the validity and insights of poetic faith, this consolidation produces a virtuous cycle that allows further and deeper knowledge. On the other hand, and perhaps most importantly, the power of disbelief, or dissent, is not surrendered in this experiment. It is suspended, but not relinquished. It remains under the control of the will. The result is that the capacity for ideological criticism does not depart. There is an initial trust in the work of the author and a willingness to listen that could lead to dialogue across political or sectarian barriers. Yet at any time, if needed, disbelief can re-emerge, shatter the illusion, debunk the poetic faith placed in an author, and launch the required form of critique. This “willing resumption of disbelief” is not simply a function of a work’s enclosing frame, but rather remains a power within the reader. Nor is it a continual half-hearted tolerance that undermines the enchantment throughout. With the “willing resumption of disbelief” accompanying an “experimentative” poetic faith, Coleridge’s hermeneutic presents a theoretically and methodologically intriguing possibility—a robust aesthetic engagement that preserves the critical power of dissent.

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Bad faith and the Dark Knight: Resuming disbelief in Bertram If interpreted within Coleridge’s recursive, life-long thinking about faith, the Biographia Literaria offers a literary theory of “experimentative” poetic faith that addresses the fundamental dual problems of the arid critical vantage and the enthralled absorptive approach. In its penultimate chapter, the work also appears to offer a case study of this hermeneutical approach in its critical discussion of Charles Maturin’s gothic play Bertram; or The Castle of St. Aldobrand (1816). However, as a hasty revision of an 1816 review fi rst made anonymously in letters to the ministerial paper The Courier, Coleridge’s chapter is much less a seasoned reflection on life and letters and much more a shot fi red in the ongoing culture wars of the romantic period. Coleridge’s appraisal of Bertram could have been an experiment in his experimentative poetic faith, but his aggressive hostility and rapid resumption of disbelief suggest that his engagement with the contentious world of romantic theater was done in “bad faith,” threatening to run his theory aground even within the pages of the Biographia. This case study testifies to both Coleridge’s personal shortcomings and the intensity of ideological divisions in the period. Yet the equally intense challenge posed by Bertram, particularly in its original manuscript version, also illustrates the potentially limiting ethical and political difficulties of the “willing resumption of disbelief” within a literary methodology. The presence of what is essentially a review of Bertram in the Biographia Literaria bears unwilling witness to the importance of the romantic theater.8 Although Coleridge is often dismissive of the stage (despite his own theatrical involvement), he positions this review as crucial to the organic unity of the Biographia and his own self-representation as a critic and public intellectual avant la lettre. His central contention is that, just as he claims to have undergone no apostasy in his political principles, he also was true in his aesthetic views or what he calls his “principles of taste” (2: 208). In addition, this passage is part of Coleridge’s intervention in the post-Napoleonic struggle for British national culture. According to Coleridge, after the 1812 rebuilding of Drury Lane, there was to be a purging of illegitimate spectacle and even less

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legitimate productions of radical German “Kotzebuisms” (2: 208). Yet by 1816, Bertram was the postdiluvian play to emerge, and its success, along with Drury Lane’s rejection of Coleridge’s own play Zapolya, raised Coleridge’s ire that the “shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confi ned to politics” (2: 229). Coleridge’s review, then, not only puts his personal integrity and aesthetic judgment to the test but also enlists him as a champion of the “redemption of the British stage” and opponent of the “depravation of the public mind” in the confl icted field of Regency cultural politics (2: 208, 229). A short summary of Bertram can reveal what Coleridge feared, but also what he may have overlooked. Like The Tempest, Maturin’s gothic play opens with a troubled seascape. A group of Italian monks witness the “piteous, fearful sight” of a ship foundering from the blasts of what is considered “no earthly storm” (I.i.320–1). Yet when the mysterious eponymous protagonist washes up at the door of Lord Aldobrand, a political rival who has married Bertram’s beloved Imogine, the plot darkly interweaves elements of Othello and MacBeth. Prefiguring what we have come to call the Byronic hero, Bertram—alluring in his “wild and terrible grandeur,” a “ruin’d grandeur” of “no common sort” (II.ii.334–5)—persuades the lady of the castle to meet him for one “parting hour” to indulge the “luxury of anguish” (III.ii.347). After the former lovers “met in madness” and part “in guilt” (IV.ii.352), Lord Aldobrand returns from the Crusades with a desire for rest and a warrant for Bertram’s arrest. The proud and vengeful exile, however, strikes fi rst, murdering Aldobrand. Maddened by guilt, Imogine kills her son and herself, prompting the proud and powerful Bertram to take his own life. The action is salacious enough, but Jeffrey N. Cox has argued that the usurping rebel Bertram captured the “period’s fascination with the grand figure of Napoleon” and carried with it an “immediate ideological charge” (Seven Gothic Dramas 60). Having lived to regret his own youthful revolutionary enthusiasm, Coleridge reacted strongly against Maturin’s unleashing of destabilizing erotic energies, questioning of religious and political institutions, and sympathizing with the magnificent outcast even while chaotic violence descends around and through him. I do not want to focus here on the review’s political outcome, Coleridge’s denunciation of Bertram as an atheistic “superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense” that confirms his more youthful

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denunciation of the “jacobinical drama” for its “confusion and subversion of the natural order of things” eighteen years ago, that is 1798 the year of the Lyrical Ballads (BL 2: 233, 221). Rather, I want to focus on Coleridge’s failure to follow through with his own method of dramatic criticism, namely the model of poetic faith formulated in his recollection of 1798. By restraining disagreement and encountering the play with experimental credulity, Coleridge could have claimed that he was an engaged critic working in good faith but also one possessing a moral, political, and, importantly for Coleridge, consistent intelligence. So the “how” of this attack is just as important as its “what.” Coleridge implies that this review will indeed deploy the earlier hermeneutical method as he revisits the language of stage illusion, the “suspension of all our judgment” that is “voluntary,” the call “not to disbelieve,” and the preparedness of critical judgment to emerge from “behind the curtain” to break the artist’s power in a willing resumption of disbelief (2: 217–18). It is, however, Coleridge’s inability to proceed with his own method that splits the Biographia into a fractured work and shows the degree of strife and pressure in literary politics between the 1812 apostasy of the Regent and the 1819 Peterloo Massacre. This pressure registers in three ways that demonstrate Coleridge is writing in bad, not poetic, faith. First, with each quotation, rather than taking his reader deeper into the passage and guiding her through the re-experience of the play, Coleridge only provides terse ejaculations that not only demonstrate his own disengagement but also force that distance on his reader. After a long, dramatic passage describing Bertram’s escape from the opening tempest in which “alone / That man was saved,” Coleridge offers the searching analysis: “Well!” (2: 222). This formula, repeated in the review, has the same deflating effect as in the opening of “Dejection: An Ode” (PW 1.2.293: 697.1). That abortive rhetorical gesture ensures that the review’s reader can see, but not feel the dramatic power of Maturin’s play. The counter-spirit of this “Well!” governs the sarcastic replies to other quoted passages from Bertram: “A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo!” (2: 223), and “The natural answer would have been—Why the scenepainter to be sure!” (2: 224). Sometimes he cannot even wait for the quote to end in order to interject, as when Bertram rejects the monk’s assistance saying “there’s poison in your touch. / But I must

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yield, for this (What?) hath left me strengthless” (2: 223) or in the chilling moment when Imogine reveals the death of her child crying “The forest-fiend hath snatched him— / He (who? The fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro’ the wizzard woods” (2: 232). These interventions take the passion and the life out of these passages and are designed to prevent any future spectator from enjoying or engaging the play. Further, they suggest that Coleridge, as a critic, was resuming disbelief throughout the play. In any case, he was so worried about the moral peril resulting from “poetic faith” that his own pointed, sarcastic prose punctures the illusion even of these momentary glimpses into Bertram and imposes disbelief onto any future performances. Second, Coleridge constantly attends to meta-level stagecraft, or looks “behind the curtain,” in a consistent effort to disconnect readers from the play’s action. He calls attention to the poor acoustics of the capacious Drury-Lane theater, to the sound of Cockney “carts and hackney coaches” passing outside, and, with anti-theatrical stereotypes, criticizes the hyperbolic conventions of Imogine’s concluding deterioration as “what in the theatrical language is called the madness” (2: 231, 230). This attention to stagecraft at the expense of engaging the play climaxes in the infamous episode of a John Bull audience member who reacts to the “act and consummation” of Imogine and Bertram’s off-stage reunion by “pointing to the actor” and whispering to Coleridge, “Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been committing adultery!” (2: 229). This, of course, provides the proper moral rebuff to Maturin’s work, but it is Coleridge who claims that this British “everyman” is “pointing to the actor” (here the diminutive Edmund Kean) rather than the character Bertram, as the shocked interjection would suggest. The subtle shift in language signals a subtle shift in emphasis, and does not imply that Coleridge and his new friend companion were speculating on Kean’s personal debauchery. It is enough, however, to call attention to the enacted and illusory nature of the play. Coleridge has interpolated what Tolkien called the view “from outside” in making Bertram momentarily back into Kean (“On Fairy Stories” 60). He thus renders his reader conscious of the obligation to view Bertram as Bertram again, and thereby disrupts the immediacy and the potency of Maturin’s production. If these two aspects of Coleridge’s review are a kind of theatrical prophylactic to prevent his reader from fully engaging the play,

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his incomplete analysis shows an unwillingness to cooperate with the author in order to make the illusion work. He will not provide that act of will or “poetic faith” needed to reach a fuller aesthetic experience and refuses the “geniality” that would “judge in the same spirit in which the Artist produced” (SWF 1: 360). Instead, Coleridge criticizes “words chosen without reason” rather than trying to understand what the rationale of the diction might be (BL 2: 226n). He traces an allusion in the aforementioned madness of Imogine through Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton only to label it a “senseless plagiarism,” a hard sell for current readers of the Biographia Literaria (2: 232–3). But Coleridge is not willing to do his part, to meet the author half-way, to do the co-exertion of poetic faith, which is to cooperate with the actors and the director in making sense of the words and the world of the play. The result is that this review does not, by Coleridge’s own standard, constitute a review. Without the active engagement of a generous and genial experimentative faith, there is no authentic aesthetic experience so there can be no account or assessment of that experience, nor of its concomitant ideology. This Coleridge has eyes, yet sees not, ears that hear not, and a heart that neither feels nor understands. He cannot prepare the reader to enter more deeply into the dramatic thrall of an upcoming aesthetic experience, nor later summon judgment that could fully evaluate that experience. It is all prevenient critique without encounter, differing in degree not kind from the preemptive critical attacks on Coleridge’s Lay Sermons by Hazlitt or Wordsworth’s 1819 “Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse” by Shelley, which were both written before the targeted texts were read.9 Disappointingly, there can be no dialogue across ideological difference, one of the most promising aspects of “poetic faith.” Instead, Coleridge only proceeds with denunciations that thinly veil his political maneuvering and personal resentment. This leaves the Biographia a fi ssured work, split between its robust theory of dramatic criticism and its limiting praxis, between high-minded poetic faith and ad hominem disbelief, and ultimately between 1798 and 1816. It seems to leave us with Coleridge as an ambivalent guide, not unlike the Coleridge Hazlitt identified in The Spirit of the Age “pitching his tent upon the barren waste without, and having no abiding place nor city of refuge!” (38).

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Yet, even while it is important to acknowledge the shortcomings of Coleridge’s aborted application of his hermeneutic theory as what Cox rightly calls in Seven Gothic Dramas a “political reading of the poetic” (61) and to see the Biographia fractured by Coleridge adopting the attacking role of “reactionary spokesman” (65), it is also important to acknowledge the full challenge of Bertram to “poetic faith.” Cox has documented that the version performed before Coleridge was driven by Bertram and Imogine’s uncontainable and undeniable erotic energy, whose intensity made the play’s political subversion all the more difficult for Coleridge’s “will to believe.” Yet if this retrospectively seems a regrettable prudishness that limits Coleridge as a critic, Bertram’s original version, whose vestiges remained in performance, should still resonate as deeply disturbing and threatening. The fi nal revised plot was, in fact, such a major deviation from the original script that Maturin viewed Bertram as “un-Maturined completely” and saw himself as a “Prospero” vanquished by friendly and official censors who had “broken my wand and drowned my Magic Book” (qtd. in Seven Gothic Dramas 65). The vanity of his art that Maturin had originally intended to bestow upon Drury Lane was centered instead on a Faustian pact with the devil through which Bertram acquires the infernal resolution to seduce Imogine and kill Aldobrand. Cox has argued that Maturin had to hastily reinvent the cause of Bertram’s action when Walter Scott and others declared the sublimely demonic “Dark Knight of the Forest” too controversial for the stage. Even though Maturin retouched his play to paint over the satanic sequences, its influence remained. For instance, early in the play, the desperate shipwrecked stranger Bertram startles the pious Prior with his looks and his words: stran. [Bertram] (Suddenly starting from his Couch, falling on his knees; and raising his clasped hands.) I would consort with mine eternal enemy, To be revenged on him.— prior. Art thou a man, or fiend, who speakest thus. stran. I was a man, I know not what I am—(II.i.331) At this point in the play, the object of this stranger’s hatred— the unspoken antecedent for “him”—has not been revealed as

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Aldobrand. Even in its edited form, with a removed reference to a “fiery talon,” however, the “eternal enemy” still clearly references Satan, the fallen angel whose very name translates as “adversary” or “enemy.” Although Bertram’s words about a demonic pact are offered in the conditional tense (“I would consort”), the stage directions have him genuflecting in a petitionary pose. Not only is this “black prayer” comparable to Cenci’s “black mass” in Shelley’s grim Italian tragedy (I.iii.76–89), but it also effectively enacts the deal with the devil as Bertram offers his soul in exchange for vengeance. What if a Faustian pact remains coursing through the veins of Bertram? If this is the case, then the work would be a different type of dramatic illusion with a darker vision shaping and governing its form and ideology. It would no longer, or not just, be a less cheerful version of Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1816), a politically astute poem that presents the violence following the adultery of Dante’s Paulo and Francesca as stemming from unjust patriarchal institutions foisting an unjust marriage between true passion. “It was the great social mistake, still the commonest among us, arising from want of better knowledge, and producing endless mistake, confusion, and a war of principle, in all the relations of life,” wrote Hunt of the message of Rimini. “Society lied, and taught lying, with contradictory tenets that drove the habit to desperation” (17–18). Restoring the scenes with the “Dark Knight of the Forest” yields not such a social protest poem identifying the effects and culpability of social corruption, but rather a work grounded in the fascinating power of malevolent influence. In the central deleted scene, Bertram opens his account of his transformative encounter between Bertram and the Dark Knight with a question that recalls Gloucester’s beneficent guide on the supposed cliff in King Lear: “Was he a man fiend?— Whate’er it was / It hath dealt wonderfully with me—” (II. iii.380).10 Yet any hopes for the benevolent illusions of an Edgar or a Paulina are overshadowed by an expansive description that puts the protagonist and audience before a spectacular figure of Ozymandian might and fiery malignancy: How tower’d his proud form through the shrouding gloom, How spoke the eloquent silence of its motion, How through the barred vizor did his accents

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Roll their rich thunder on their pausing soul! And though his mailed hand did shun my grasp, And though his closed morion hid his feature, Yea all resemblance to the face of man, I felt the hollow whisper of his welcome, I felt those unseen eyes were fi x’d on mine, If eyes indeed were there— Forgotten thoughts of evil, still-born mischiefs, Foul, fertile seeds of passion and of crime, The night-veiled thoughts of many a ghastly hour Day may not look upon— That wither’d in my heart’s abortive core, Rous’d their dark battle at his trumpet-peal. (II.iii.380) This beholding of a “visionary form dramatic” reads like another play-within-the-play, a powerful sensory experience before an illusory form that draws in Bertram deeply. Yet this engagement seems to operate beyond his will, quickening thoughts that he had previously, in his ordinary senses, stifled. This well-staged form, augmented by perfectly delivered rhetoric, dominates Bertram individually and portends destructive social effects. Like Christabel, Bertram is transformed in ways he cannot understand fully or account for: “I am not what I was since I beheld him—” (II.iii.380). This voice has exploited his “poetic faith” and forged it into unwavering resolve. The effect is so potent that a monk’s subsequent attempt to perform a cliff-side healing aesthetic ritual, which is almost identical to Edgar’s, is so feckless that its allusion is easily overlooked (V.iii.372). Bertram leaves the Dark Knight’s performance not with wonder, but terroristic determination, rendered in undeniable trochaic alliteration, that will not be confined: “Down pours the dense and darkening lave-tide, / Arresting life and stilling all beneath it” (II, iii, 380). This vicious resolve presents “dangerous consequences” from an aesthetic encounter that cannot be enclosed (Gallagher 378). This is a power and enmity not to be entertained. It may not make sense to ask whether the kinetic Bertram could or should have distrusted or resisted this figure. Beyond the delicate or pragmatic concerns of Maturin’s comforters, however, it can be asked whether an audience should overhear it. Can we and should we, in Kastan’s term, make a “covenant” with Maturin’s “Dark

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Knight”? Such a reorienting experience, whose power exceeds critical quarantine, would seem to foster an openness to vitriol and to seduce faith into irrational violence. Given its potential for reverberating and lasting psychological effect, this summoned dramatic illusion would seem to justify the willing resumption of disbelief. But discontinuing “experimentative poetic faith” raises more difficult questions. When should such disbelief resume? How do we know what aesthetic experiences could exceed their performance? And do so without our will? How do we judge when to disengage with a dramatic production? Before, after, or during the performance? Does the Dark Knight’s radicalizing power justify Coleridge’s preemptory attack in The Courier and the Biographia Literaria? Too much poetic faith would take us to the demon’s forest or to Ozymandias’s empire; too little faith and we never develop Hunt’s sympathy for the “last victims” or experience the Shakespearean miracle. And how do we make a literary judgment about what is beyond the pale of representation and spectatorship? Who do we trust to guide us in these decisions? These questions of “how” and “when” begin to call for political, ethical, and even theological judgment that would seem to be beyond the scope of critical methodology. Yet, as the next section returns to Tolkien, it will suggest that Coleridge’s literary theory of “poetic faith” and the “willing resumption of disbelief” demonstrates how literary criticism needs those modes of knowing and judging from beyond its borders in order to fulfill its own promises of individual transformation and social amelioration.

Rhetoric, power, and poetic faith To address the questions raised by Coleridge’s limiting practice of the willing resumption of disbelief, this section attempts to expand our understanding of poetic faith and the rhetorical politics of performing and listening by considering an overheard debate between two wizards in The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). While Tolkien has been recently dubbed the “author of the century,” for both his popularity and his reflection on modernity’s struggles, to an early reviewer such as Edwin Muir, this inquiry would seem dubious, at best (Shippey xvii–xx). Muir argues that the fantastic setting of Middle-Earth precludes any claims to literary seriousness

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and flees from any pressing concerns with social reality into “a long and intricate game” of puerile morality that pits “orcs, who are . . . very bad boys indeed” against “good boys” who emerge “well, triumphant, and happy” (121). Tolkien’s friend, C. S. Lewis, answered in bafflement that “it is not easy to see how anyone could have said this” since, throughout the work, motives, “even on the right side” are “mixed” and “traitors usually begin with comparatively innocent intentions” (“Dethronement” 11–12). Among Tolkien scholars, Lewis’s apology has received consistent critical support, perhaps most forcefully stated in Patricia Meyer Spacks’s argument that any apparent “simplicity” in Tolkien’s “ethical system is redeemed by the philosophical complexity of its context: simplicity does not equal shallowness” (56). As if to illustrate such complexity, her own nuanced tracing of the influences of a “pagan ethos” concerned with fate and failure and an implied “theological scheme” dealing with the freedom of the will has recently been followed across two volumes by a contemporary cohort of scholars.11 There is however, a tendency to pursue these questions by focusing on the “macro” level or what Lewis called the “very high architectural quality of the romance” (“Dethronement” 12). In attending to the work’s surprisingly elusive genre, Jane Chance has called Lord of the Rings an “epic novel” whose moral complexity derives from its “structural unity” (143–4); Shippey discusses the “complex neatness of its overall design” whose symmetry is “more than discoverable, it is unmistakable” (50–1); while W. H. Auden defends it as a deeply resonant “Quest tale” in which “personages are almost bound to be archetypes rather than idiosyncratic individuals” (39). Much of the meaning of Tolkien’s work, however, derives from smaller episodes—conversations and gestures that include images and tropes on the “micro” level. These are thematically pivotal even if they could be, at fi rst glance, excised from any summary of the overarching action. The parley at the besieged tower of Orthanc is one such incident that dramatizes Tolkien’s keen awareness of rhetoric and its effects. The exchange between the defeated Saruman and Gandalf redivivus points a way for negotiating both literature’s potential for transformative liberation and its danger for manipulative corruption. This encounter, which occurs in the chapter “The Voice of Saruman,” takes place between two ideological opponents and occupies a surprisingly extended narrative between battles for

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control of the omnipotent ring at the plot’s center. Saruman had been the ally of the sagacious, if impatient, Gandalf, and the leader of the order of wizards, who are higher, almost angelic, beings in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Yet, with either an intended good end to justify his means or his own empowerment in mind, Saruman secretly struck a conciliatory pact with the rising totalitarian regime of Sauron—the disembodied figure of homogenization and domination bearing down upon the age from his tower of Baraddûr in Mordor. To establish himself as a collaborative rival in the tower of Orthanc, Saruman galvanizes the surrounding verdant land of Isengard into a potent industrial waste. While such towering misanthropy is insidious, a “mis-arbory” that fells forests is as great a moral and political failing in Tolkien’s secondary world. Saruman’s pride, treachery, and malevolent form of modernization make him a Satanic figure, whose non serviam can be recognized across worlds: “He will not serve, only command” (584). Thus, as a demonical adversary character whose potency resides in his voice, Saruman is akin to Maturin’s Dark Knight of the Forest. Just as Maturin explores that voice through its psychological entrapment of Bertram, Tolkien dedicates a long passage to parsing the effects of Saruman’s rhetorical performance in ways that approximate Coleridge’s understanding of dramatic illusion: Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that is was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. (578) There is a Shelleyan grandeur and beauty in Tolkien’s description of this poetic wizard, even as there is a moral ambiguity surrounding his enchanting voice. When Saruman was a trusted leader, listening to him “unwarily”—with suspended disbelief and an enthralled poetic faith—could lead the soul through a pleasurable ascent toward knowledge and wisdom. As a traitor, he retains this power, but the goals of his grandiloquence become questionable

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and the words “unwarily,” “swift agreement,” and “seem” become warning signals. Tolkien goes on to acknowledge the xenophobia toward “others” and violent “anger” that Saruman’s beautiful voice could produce. The critical vantage, at fi rst, appears able to defuse its allure as “when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it” (578). Yet neither McGann’s “critical vantage” nor Gallagher’s “protective enclosure” of aesthetic fi nitude offer sufficient security. As with Shelley’s “soft voices” that reverberate “in the memory” or the Dark Knight’s “hallow whisper,” Saruman’s “spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them” (578). The passage thus suggests that the “willing resumption of disbelief” is needed, but difficult, since “none were unmoved” by the enchanting voice and “none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will” (578). Given Saruman’s revealed malevolence and his remaining potency, this hiatal chapter seems all the stranger. Gandalf and the hardy, martial Riders of Rohan have just wasted valuable time and resources defeating Saruman. Instead of rushing off to deal with the original and imminent threat of Sauron, they instead listen patiently and receptively while Saruman’s “words return” from his monumental tower, Orthanc, whose name translates as “the cunning mind” (555). This willful listening to Saruman raises two critical questions that ultimately point to Tolkien’s insights into literary theory. First, if Saruman’s treachery is known, why does Gandalf not immediately invoke a protective disbelief against Saruman’s voice, as Coleridge did to Bertram? Second, if Gandalf attends to Saruman with “poetic faith” and allows others to do so, then how does he eventually disarm the dark wizard with the effort of mind and will that constitute the “willing resumption of disbelief”? First, why allow the treasonous Saruman to speak at all and why listen to the poetic wizard? Silencing or ignoring the apostate would have been justifi able with further war threatening and his persistent danger known. Tolkien allows for a good deal of divergent discussion within a replete storyline that fi lls about one thousand pages. Its inclusion, highlighted with a chapter heading, suggests that Tolkien recognized the importance of dramatic dialogue, even across confl icting beliefs and factions, and that such transformative listening and making represent

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a significant aspect of human life and history. With regards to listening, Tolkien goes to great lengths to animate this moment of attending, as the soul of Théoden, who has been deceived by a minion of Saruman, hangs in the balance. When the enchanting wizard begins to make a suavely compelling case and Théoden feels the glower of his “dark solemn eyes,” the king fi rst looks to Gandalf for guidance, either for a retort to Saruman’s vision, or for a silencing of this magical rival, or for an order to avoid the voice (579). But Gandalf allows the show to proceed without casting any disbelief or doubt, making “no sign” and standing “silent as stone, as one waiting patiently for some call that has not yet come” (579). Far from dismissing his enemy, Gandalf seems to be acting in poetic faith, attending to and genially cooperating with the delivery of this adversary’s message. As Saruman builds his case by singing the glories of Rohan and promising to rebuild its renown, the threat to Théoden and his thanes only builds. Théoden remains silent, possibly in thrall, and his inner life becomes inscrutable: “Whether he strove with anger or doubt none could say” (579). “I like your silence,” Paulina says to the mesmerized Leontes before the supposed statue of Hermione, “it the more shows off your wonder” (V.iii.21–2). While both Théoden and Gandalf remain similarly quiet and attentive, others from Rohan are conquered by the narrative and “cried out gladly” in swift assent to Saruman’s “wisdom” (580). All seems on the verge of being lost until Théoden suddenly ends his “poetic faith” and resumes disbelief in his opponent: “Yes, we will have peace . . . we will have peace, when you and all your works have perished—and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men’s hearts” (580). The words decisively echo the renunciation of Satan and “all his works” in the baptismal rite of the Roman Catholic Church, Tolkien’s own religion.12 Yet if Saruman’s malfeasance was known beforehand, why would Gandalf allow it to proceed to this perilous point, to the “balance of a hair” (584), and why would Tolkien want to dramatize it? The Lord of the Rings seems to suggest that there is some value in this struggle. Seeing into the heart of the illusion allows Théoden to be presented with his own weaknesses and temptation, to flesh out what St Augustine in The City of God would call his own libido dominandi, or lust to dominate (42,

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577).13 When other characters encounter the ring (Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir, Galadriel, Faramir, Sam), they are all presented with a similar narrative of self-aggrandizement, ambiguously voiced by their own imagination or projections of the ring itself. All but Boromir are able to reject and renounce those tempting psychic illusions and emerge afterward with a measure of immunity from the ring. Had any of the others failed, the rise of an authoritarian age would have been inevitable. Boromir fails because he never becomes aware of his own story until it is too late. Unable to see his own narrative fully, he remains naive and thus vulnerable. Listening like Théoden’s thus can be a kind of mental training, what A. D. Nuttall described as a “self-trial” involving the “irresponsible pleasure of arousal” with “the responsibilities of probable knowledge and intellectual assent” (77, 104). Seeing one’s desire to dominate staged and performed enables an inchoate set of temptations to come into view and to be better understood. For the recently healed Théoden, the moment confi rms and clarifies his call to humbler service and altruistic courage. And yet as the case of Boromir makes clear, Tolkien recognizes that, even with the guiding presence of the sagacious Gandalf, such an undertaking remains dangerous, a serious trial that some like the prudent Faramir realize they should avoid (581). Poetic faith for Tolkien may involve a greater license and greater exposure than Coleridge’s practice allowed, but it does so with a sense of acknowledged risk and possible moral failure with real political and personal consequences. Not only is the neutral ground of Gallagher’s “controlled situation” not guaranteed (348), the aesthetic encounter seems to open up many possible paths branching between seduction and liberation, and even different types of seduction and liberation. If Tolkien places more trust in listening with poetic faith than Coleridge, the wisdom of Gandalf also holds out a similar, perhaps even more unlikely, hope for the “maker,” Saruman. As soon as Théoden disbelieves in Saruman’s false promises, Gandalf makes the captive a series of offers: fi rst to “unsay” his schemes, then to “come down” from his tower, and fi nally to “turn to new things” (581–2). Each represents a different way of phrasing the same call to conversion, or stages in the conversion process, as does Gandalf’s offer of being morally and physically “free” if he does (582). Gandalf’s hope for this performance

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to end with Saruman’s redemption is so unlikely that no one else recognized it as a possible outcome, with Merry and Pippin seeing Saruman’s hardening of heart as a necessary conclusion. Yet when Gandalf calls Saruman “pitiable,” he recalls the act of “pity” for Gollum by fi rst Bilbo and later Frodo and Sam (583). Their sympathy for Gollum’s suffering and degradation stop them from eliminating the corrupted creature, a killing that would have been justifi ed by both a self-defensive pragmatism and a reasonable appeal to justice. Yet when understanding Gollum’s story and seeing his hobbit-like form, they relented and recognized their own weakness and potential ruin in him. Likewise, it may not just have been that Gandalf hoped that a “talking cure,” like Orual’s in Lewis’s 1956 novel Till We Have Faces (289–93), would have led Saruman to rethink his ways, but also that he may have seen his own potential for falling in his former comrade. Tolkien allows less access to internal monologue than most modern writers, but “pity” may explain his remark about “so much that was good” of his fellow wizard that “now festers in the tower” (585). For Tolkien, both listening and creating are vehicles for deeper insight, self-understanding, and conversion. Even in a fallen and corrupt world and even for the fallen and the corrupt, sub-creating is a divine gift and a possible means of redemption, a human “right / (used or misused)” that “has not decayed” (“Mythopoeia” 87). As Saruman’s bitterness reveals, this aesthetic freedom is a severe one with high existential stakes and outcomes that can be tragic. Such dramatic trials also place “poetic faith” at the center of the work’s philosophical complexity. “Saruman’s Voice” demonstrates that Tolkien recommends “poetic faith,” even in this extreme case, a case involving an adversarial Satanic figure intent on abusing the gift of creativity. Tolkien does so, without the limiting, but also protective, predisposition of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”14 This hermeneutic of generosity extends even to Saruman whose imminent danger is known. As a literary theory, jettisoning the “willing suspension of disbelief” means reading “unwarily” and approaching with the “genuine thing” that Tolkien names “Primary Belief”: But in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact

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may slip from your grasp. To experience directly a Secondary World: the potion is too strong, and you give to it Primary Belief, however marvellous the events. (“On Fairy Stories” 72–3) In Tolkien’s unique vernacular, this spellbinding “potion” describes what Coleridge calls “poetic faith,” the intense and unchecked aesthetic experience of inhabiting a dream or dramatic illusion. Yet it seems that Tolkien—whose epochal work centers on an omnipotent ring, a philosophical symbol of corrupting power with a lineage from Plato to Wagner—naively forgets the role of power and ideology in his theoretical claims. By rendering art a kind of magic and our state of belief as being under a “spell” (even criticizing MacBeth’s witches as insufficiently potent necromancers in performance), Tolkien has not, however, simply put us back before the Wizard of Oz trying to subject ourselves to the power of his illusions or before Ozymandias or Wellington blithely enslaving ourselves, again, to rhetorical power (71). Tolkien is not oblivious to critical disenchantment, the need for which the incessant branding in David Foster Wallace’s Infi nite Jest (1996) overwhelmingly portrays and the political intelligence of Eagleton rightly warns. He does in fact recognize two modes of art: “enchantment,” which describes a genial collaboration “in which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside”; and “magic,” which produces not partnership but “domination of things and wills” (“On Fairy Stories” 73). Magic motivates Saruman’s “greed for self-centred power” (“On Fairy Stories” 73), while enchantment informs Gandalf’s cooperative psychagogia, a collaborative geniality evinced in Aragorn’s words that “this business of ours will be his greatest task” (Lord of the Rings 172). For Tolkien, the disenchantment of the preventive “willing suspension of disbelief” would immunize against both the domineering charms of Saruman and the guiding song of Gandalf. Whether it is Gandalf urging at the Council of Elrond or Saruman appealing from the Tower of Orthanc, everyone in Middle-Earth knows that the wizards have political and personal agendas. But the question remains: whom to listen to? Whom to follow? Who will foster good making and good believing? Who knows the road to the good life? If shared lives are constituted

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by making, listening, believing, and dissenting, then a panacean disbelief does not address what is good or bad making, good or bad listening, and ultimately good or bad living. It misses opportunities for exchange, for conversions of heart, for greater self-understanding. It confl ates partnership and domination. By attending to Saruman’s voice and allowing Théoden and others to do so, Tolkien thus recognizes the importance of an experimentative “poetic faith.” Since following the right wizard, however, is also of crucial importance, Tolkien’s novel also dramatizes how the “willing resumption of disbelief” breaks a malevolent aesthetic spell to disable the magician’s drive toward “bewitchment and domination” (“On Fairy Stories” 75). The two reactions to Saruman’s voice within Lord of the Rings suggest that critically resuming disbelief is possible as well as morally and socially necessary. The fi rst resumption comes from Théoden, who initially seems to succumb to Saruman’s smooth conciliation with the words, “We will have peace” (580). Prior to his renunciation of the fallen wizard, however, his tone defi nitively changes as he passes from speaking “thickly” to contradicting “in a clear voice” (580). That lucid response, compared to coming “out of a dream,” is a fi rm indication that he has stepped out of Saruman’s “shadow” (580, 579). Failing to persuade Théoden, Saruman turns to tempting Gandalf and weaves a tale of their shared high calling and elevated concern for the common good. When Saruman asks Gandalf “Will you not come up?,” the assembled audience has been convinced of their renewed covenant, in Kastan’s term. This “fantasy” is broken as irreparably as the fi rst when Gandalf “laughed” and Saruman’s “shadow” lifts again (582). These examples also suggest, however, that discerning when to resume disbelief requires a step beyond literary theory. When Saruman’s magic “potion” of persuasion fails, it is not because everyone discovers that he is a rhetorician. They already know of his honey-tongue. Tolkien does not dispel artistic power per se, as this would only guarantee a certain form of unmoved stasis and seeming safety, characteristic of Bilbo in Bag End. Rather the self-centered wizard’s illusion breaks when it violates his audience’s previous knowledge. Berry refers to this as a “correction” of the imagination “by experience, by critical judgment, and by further works of the imagination” (“Loss”

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95). Théoden awakes because Saruman’s proposition distorts his experience of history by ignoring atrocities committed, namely the massacre of children at Westfold and the desecration of Háma’s corpse at Hornburg (580). His clear voice proclaims a violation of political philosophy, deeming that Saruman’s war on Rohan was not “just” (580). Finally, Saruman’s voice “lost its charm,” or its aesthetic power, because Théoden, who is able to judge himself as a “lesser son of great sires,” came to a more fully realized sense of self, grounded in the virtue of humility (580). A “critical judgment” about reality—as mediated by the disciplines of political theory, history, and moral philosophy— irretrievably breaks the fraudulence of the dominating, magical illusion. For Gandalf, the process is similar, as he tells Saruman that his performance jars with his “clearer memory of your arguments, and deeds” (582). In addition to history and moral philosophy, there is another form of knowing that overshadows Saruman’s shadow. “Understand one another?” Gandalf asks rhetorically, “I fear I am beyond your comprehension” (582). This is not a boast indicating a pride opposed to Théoden’s hard-won humility. Rather, it shows that the wisdom of Gandalf, who has been transfigured after being “sent back” from an ostensibly fatal battle, holds cosmological sway over Saruman (502). His greater “comprehension” is a greater vision, like that of the Solid people in Lewis’s Great Divorce who are immune to the miniscule and mute protests of the lost ghosts (122–37). Gandalf can ridicule Saruman’s enthusiastic fantasy, because he sees it within a greater drama that unfolds sub specie aeternitatis. What can be called theological knowledge joins the other humanistic modes of knowing to govern the willing resumption of disbelief. This episode illuminates two claims about recovery and escape that Tolkien makes when positing a literary theory that would supersede the willing suspension of disbelief. “It was in fairystories,” he writes, “that I fi rst divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fi re; bread and wine” (78). Much has been rightly been said of the ways that this statement shows Tolkien’s advocacy of the power of literature, particularly fantasy, to remove what Coleridge called the “film of familiarity” (BL 2: 7), so that we may look at the world anew.15 Following G. K. Chesterton’s sense of the imagination as enabling an ordered and ecstatic home-

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coming in his 1908 intellectual autobiography Orthodoxy, Tolkien here emphasizes literature’s sacramental provocation to see clearly and to welcome gratuitously the fundamentally good gifts of creation.16 To realize such recovery fully, the willing suspension of disbelief is insufficient and the “genuine thing” of poetic faith is needed. Yet, in these elemental words and things, there is also “potency,” an “integrity” that exceeds their apprehension under the imagination’s appreciative revision. The power and wonder of stone, tree, house, and bread must also be active, interruptive forces that make themselves known to the imagination, even contradicting the imagination. When knowledge of them manifests itself, they can turn any bewitching narrative into an “insubstantial dream” (“On Fairy Stories” 81).17 The witness of things themselves thus provides potential “escape”: fi rst through the realization of being trapped within a malevolent vision’s illusory “prison” and then through a clear and jubilant call to “go home” (79). In turn, such awakening recognition and political liberation may provide the means of acknowledging and protecting the “integrity of things,” as Eagleton advocated (Event 17). This is an unusual definition of escape—the liberating virtue of the real and the essential to break from what is fallacious, contingent, and hegemonic in the artificial. This inverted version of escapism, nevertheless, well describes the “willing resumption of disbelief” as an epistemological power that supports and accompanies the unwary but vivifying wonder of poetic faith.

Notes 1 For Kastan’s reliance upon McCoy’s interpretation of Coleridge’s “poetic faith,” see 14 n.30. 2 For accounts of early Methodism, Southcott, and Lee, see Mee 63–77, 50, and 77–81. For religious radicalism in Britain stretching from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, see Morton and Smith. 3 For Blake’s “Memorable Fancy” in which he asks Isaiah and Ezekiel “does a fi rm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so,” see plate 12 of Marriage of Heaven and Hell (38). 4 For Richards’s division between science and poetry, see 48–9. 5 For Coleridge’s advocating a “Trial” of Christianity, see his 1805 notebook entry CN 2: 2643.

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6 For the “experiment of faith” as a theme in Aids to Refl ection, see also 86–7 and 202. 7 For a fuller discussion of classical or Pyrhonnic skepticism, see Popkin ix–xiv. For the “Pyrrhonian energy” of deconstructionism, see Gallagher and Greenblatt 4. 8 For representative scholarship on the critical attention that has recovered the importance and vitality of the theater in the romantic period and of playwrights such as Joanna Baillie and Elizabeth Inchbald, see Bolton, Burroughs, Carlson, the anthology of Cox and Gamer, and Moody. For an account of Coleridge’s own interaction with Drury Lane, see Hayter. 9 For Hazlitt’s anticipatory review of Coleridge’s later prose, see Wu 198; for the sources for Shelley’s satiric poem “Peter Bell the Third,” not including Wordsworth’s actual poem, see Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 337–8. 10 The act and scene refer to the divisions in Bertram’s original manuscript, which Cox’s edition presents as an appendix to the performed version. 11 For an extended consideration of conflicting accounts of Tolkien’s pagan and Catholic worldviews, see the volumes edited by Kerry. 12 In addition to Kerry’s Ring and the Cross and Light Beyond All Shadow, see the studies by Caldecott and Smith on the way Tolkien’s Catholicism informs his writing. For the renunciation in the Roman rite in English, see par. 14 of the 1962 Rite of Baptism for Children: Priest: N., do you renounce Satan? Sponsors: I do renounce him. P: And all his works? Sponsors: I do renounce them. P: And all his attractions? Sponsors: I do renounce them. 13 In the standard subdivisions of Augustine’s City of God, the discussions of the “lust of power” take place in Book I, ch.30 and Book XIV, ch.15. 14 For Tolkien’s critique of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” see 54–5. 15 For a book-length discussion of Tolkien’s quest for “transcendence” through such “recovery,” see Garbowski. 16 For Chesterton’s discussion of homecoming through defamiliarization, see 1–7 and for literature’s capacity to facilitate such imaginative revision see 59–90. For Tolkien’s discussion of such “Chestertonian fantasy,” see 77–8.

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17 In his critique of the internal-combustion engine and factory chimneys, Tolkien is at his most ecological in discussing escape. It is crucial to note, however, that it is not just that “fairy-stories” provide temporary solace from a mechanized world, but rather that literature allows the potency of elm-trees and horses to counteract, more permanently, narratives of the social and ecological conditions of late capitalism as necessary, irrefragable, and superior. For more on Tolkien’s ecological commitments, see Curry.

Conclusion: Potent art This book has been a sustained reflection on the critical phrase from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (BL 2: 6). Removed from this original context, the “willing suspension of disbelief” has been a perennial resort for treating the fundamental problem in literary theory of how readers or audience members can be open to literature’s unique potential to provide human goods— for personal transformation, social solidarity, and interpersonal exchange—without being hopelessly vulnerable to irrational domination and malevolent propaganda. Both Wendell Berry and J. R. R. Tolkien have seen the limitations of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as a mediocre compromise that neither fully protects against the dangers of aesthetic captivation on the one hand and critical anaesthetization on the other; nor adequately promotes the goods of enchantment on the one hand and of fully informed critique on the other. The analysis has turned back to Coleridge, grounding this oft-borrowed sound bite within the poet’s quixotic but provocative theological thought. The result has been a Coleridgean approach to the aesthetic encounter that is not merely a tolerant pretense before fantastic illusions but rather a model of “poetic faith” analogous to his own hard-won understanding of a religious faith that awakens all the human faculties, prompts reason to ascend to its greatest capacity, and educes meaningful experience not otherwise available. Coleridge’s writing implied that the potential for critical “disbelief” should accompany an experimentative “poetic faith” that immerses itself in the artistic work even of ideological opponents by engaging the imagination at its deepest and realizing reason at its highest. Nevertheless, his own life history, refracted through the romantic-era culture wars, left him unable to practice his own theory in the Biographia Literaria

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itself as he immediately adopts a pose of disenchanted hostility that precludes “poetic faith” in Bertram. The concluding consideration of Tolkien’s dramatization in Lord of the Rings and theorization in “On Fairy Stories” of “Primary Belief” accompanied by the “willing resumption of disbelief,” which dispels aesthetic illusions when morally and politically necessary, has not just been a means to extend or to correct what Coleridge himself failed to complete or to embody for complicated and sometimes distasteful personal and historical reasons. The hope, instead, has been to gather more insights in order to respond better to literary theory’s basic questions of how and why to read. “Poetic faith” represents an intense investment of the whole person to inhabit, dramatically and cooperatively, the literary illusion that makes its call for participation across cultures and worldviews. Since circumspect critical approaches can occlude, eclipse, or foreclose the full range of experience offered through the aesthetic, the “facts” of art—which might reveal the breadth of other’s traditions and the depths of one’s own—are contingent upon the unguarded and genial engagement of “poetic faith.” Knowledge of literature should provide access to such cultural insights and offer a potential catalyst for personal transformation and social formation. The cultivation of the practices and habits of “poetic faith” would therefore be a crucial aspect of educating what Berry calls a “fully developed human being” (“Loss” 81). Since gaining poetic knowledge requires more than the restrained oblige of the “willing suspension of disbelief” or the immunized incredulity of the critical vantage, there is peril in what Prospero refers to as his “potent art” (V.i.50). On the one hand, the dramatic wizard can produce “heavenly music” and reanimate the dead even in their “graves,” but, on the other hand, Prospero admits that his “rough magic” makes “demi-puppets” of those around him (V.i.36–52). Entrusting “poetic faith” raises the existential stakes of such enchanted psychagogia. The reader or audience member must therefore retain an ability to judge what wizard to follow and must be able to ask, with Berry, of his literary works: “What is the quality of this thing as a human artifact, as an addition to the world of made and of created things? How suitable is it to the needs of human and natural neighborhoods?” (“Loss” 81). In those cases when the “airy charm” is malevolent and its effects malicious, the wizard’s staff should be broken, the illusion

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shattered, and the illusion’s potency dissipated (V.i.54). Discerning when to make such a “willing resumption of disbelief,” however, requires a broad, multifaceted faculty of judgment that includes other modes of inquiring into reality and extends beyond the scope of literary studies. Judging wizards is not easy. There is a need to know ourselves contemplatively and introspectively, to know history, to know nature, to be guided in moral knowledge by theology and philosophy, to understand political theory and the common good. There is also the need to know how these knowledges interconnect. This exfoliation of Coleridge’s literary theory has taken place through dialogue with others considering similar issues, particular New Historicist and materialist critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher, Jerome McGann, and Terry Eagleton. Out of justified political concerns, they have prioritized uncovering and disabling the hegemonic power of the aesthetic through the distanced reorientation of the critical vantage. Yet such conscientious criticism has also confessed a desire for the effects of a “potent art.” McGann poignantly illustrated the desire for communal instantiation and individual “genuine change” in Trelawney’s courageous and dedicated recovery of a beloved poet and friend’s heart from the pyre of history (13). Unlike Trelawney, who was “severely burnt” by his foolhardy grasp of Shelley’s relic, Eagleton’s self-effaced literary event and Gallagher’s “ironic credulity” have been counterproductively guarded, defaulting like Richard McCoy into “tenuous and doubtful” approaches not differing in kind from the “willing suspension of disbelief” (4). This book has argued that what Tolkien called an “unwary” hermeneutic is needed not just for rendering potential literary goods but also for launching a more comprehensive critique. If aesthetic experience is contingent upon investment, then understanding the sociological sway and political effects of literature—understanding how someone consents to an Ozymandias or reveres a Wellington—also requires “poetic faith.” Through this aesthetic fidelity, the critic can hope to be a better critic by gaining power over this potent art by understanding it more fully. Nor does this approach relinquish critique since the “willing resumption of disbelief” remains ready, when necessary and exigent, to call for disengagement and protesting contradiction. As such, this Coleridgean synthesis would not dismiss or reject

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the New Historicist project, but would rather complement and complete the critical movement. This model may also have important implications for recent critical interventions within New Historicism, such as McCoy’s Faith in Shakespeare or Gallagher’s contributions to Practicing New Historicism, that have also attempted to make space for the aesthetic, often using Coleridge’s terminology of “poetic faith” or the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Gallagher and Greenblatt’s resistance to “diminishing or belittling the power of artistic representations” should not be dismissed as either incidental placating gestures or nostalgic returns of the old New Criticism (9). Like them, this book has been arguing for the compatibility of rich aesthetic experience with effective political and social critique. Yet McCoy’s “poetic faith” and David Kastan’s Shakespearean “covenant” have safeguarded their fiduciary aesthetic commitment from naive vulnerability through distinguishing their own moderate, limited, secular “faith” from the irrational, fundamentalist, violent zeal of religion. In other words, their critical terminology summons the language of belief only to abject theology. Yet this hastily defi ned understanding of faith imposes an oppositional bifurcation with reason and thereby reductively misrepresents not only Coleridge’s idiosyncratic synthesis of St Augustine’s thought but also canonical formulations such as John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio.1 More crucially, however, this dismissal of theology could evacuate one of the most significant modes of critical inquiry within the multidisciplinary “critical judgment” that governs the “willing resumption of disbelief.” The voice of the Dark Knight of the Forest, the blandishments of the Wizard of Oz, and the beatification of Nelson all gain power through self-promoting apotheosis and arrogation of divine grandeur. One of the tasks of theology is to evaluate those claims and to name the false gods and their works. Although no acolyte himself, David Foster Wallace linked his vocation as a writer to this Augustinian task: There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you

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worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. (99–104) “Every epoch under names more or less specious has deified its peculiar errors,” Shelley, the self-described atheist, writes in a similar vein before offering that “Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world” (“A Defence” 516, 531). Judging gods is not easy. If aesthetic faith and covenants bring our souls before such hungry powers and dominions, theology should not be relegated but rather summoned alongside psychology, natural science, and moral philosophy to guide, unfold, control, and sometimes cancel our worship. Such interdependence means not only that the study of literature must maintain its own unique path to knowledge, but also that it must go outside itself to address its own fundamental problem of how to read well without irresponsibly surrendering freedom. This is not simply a call for interdisciplinarity, but rather an argument that the study of literature will flourish best within the holistic, humane, and integrated intellectual culture provided by the liberal arts, which it needs and where it is needed. For, on the one hand, “poetic faith” suggests that interpretive acts, be they critical or pedagogical, should be dramaturgical. If entering into an aesthetic work requires contextual knowledge, formal awareness, and judgment of character, the critic or teacher can offer preparatory guidance on what makes a text or a play or a statue work. This approach allows each interpretation to be performative, while allowing debate about what constitutes the best understanding of what should shape and defi ne that performance. Such animating instruction can shift the human horizon of expectations beyond the “slavish economizing” of Bag End. On the other hand, there is not a particular literary methodology or approach, even one as continually attractive as the “willing suspension of disbelief,” that would remove the difficulty of distinguishing the powers and perils of art. Aesthetic illusions do not present what E. F. Schumacher in A Guide for the Perplexed has called a convergent problem, a question or challenge that is technically and fi nally soluble, like formulating a vaccine or designing a dam. Rather, literature is a problem like “how to

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educate our children,” one in which “a number of highly able people . . . come up with answers which contradict one another” (122). These “divergent” problems must be taken up anew by each individual, in each generation and cannot be “killed” (126). The enduring challenge of discerning when literature requires the “willing resumption of disbelief” demands a holistic, humanistic response derived from an education that Berry describes as “organic, unified, comprehensive, connective—and moral” (“Loss” 82). “Poetic faith” may describe a mode of receptivity that enables us to better realize art’s potential for our souls and our societies. The “willing resumption of disbelief” may illuminate how contravening knowledge may defend the enchanted listener by breaking the fraudulence of the dominating, magical illusion. Yet the needed co-inherence of the two requires a broader and deeper formation: “how to make and how to judge” in Berry’s words and, in Tolkien’s, the “shared enrichment” that seeks “partners in making and delight, not slaves” (“Loss” 81; “On Fairy Stories” 74). Such literary and multidisciplinary training is needed for an intelligent, responsive, and responsible citizen, who must tread a hard road, tacking between receptive wonder and incisive critique in a time when illusions are not leaving and humane goods are not lost. The search for a figure representative of this formation leads Coleridge back to The Tempest and Miranda, whose name itself etymologically evokes “wonder.” For Coleridge, Prospero’s daughter best embodies such unity in her delicate “innocence, yet with all the powers of her mind unweakened by the combats of life” (SC 2: 171–2). 2 Her sympathies resound with “simplicity and tenderness” and, despite her isolation in a “desert,” her judgment is formed “with all the advantages of education, all that could be communicated by a wise and affectionate father” (SC 2: 171). Coleridge argues that the creation of Miranda shows the range of Shakespeare’s powers and the expansive, vocating influence he may have on his audience: Of Miranda we may say, that she possesses in herself all the ideal beauties that could be imagined by the greatest poet of any age or country; but it is not my purpose now, so much to point out the high poetic powers of Shakespeare, as to illustrate his exquisite judgment, and it is solely with this design that I have

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noticed a passage with which, it seems to me, some critics, and those among the best, have been unreasonably dissatisfied. If Shakespeare be the wonder of the ignorant, he is, and ought to be, much more the wonder of the learned: not only from profundity of thought, but from his astonishing and intuitive knowledge of what man must be at all times, and under all circumstances, he is rather to be looked upon as a prophet than as a poet. Yet, with all these unbounded powers, with all this might and majesty of genius, he makes us feel as if he were unconscious of himself, and of his high destiny, disguising the half god in the simplicity of a child. (SC 2: 180–1) Yet as Miranda arrived in her brave new world, the world of Italy, what other worlds would she encounter there? What dreams of twangling instruments and heavenly music, what ghosts and guides, what revels, what lost loves, what fiends, fathers, monsters, men? How will she know when to wonder with the wise and the unlettered, and how will she know what to “be at all times, and under all circumstances?” Even with childlike “poetic faith” and the semi-divine wisdom needed for the “willing resumption of disbelief,” such is the difficult, lifelong challenge and call that literature contributes to and demands from the art of living: how to love and how to know, how to judge and how to delight.

Notes 1 For the affi rmation of the indispensability of reason and the complementarity of faith and reason in Roman Catholic thought, see John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio: “On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it” (par. 5). For a broad discussion of the the encyclical’s implications for theology and philosophy, see Hemming and Parsons. For an alternative translation that conveys faith and reason’s codependence, see Hemming and Parsons’s Restoring Faith in Reason.

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2 This reflection on The Tempest comes from the ninth lecture of Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. There is not a defi nitive transcript of these lectures, but the following is a composition based on lecture notes. This version is also printed in Lects 1808–19 (2: 510–28), as are the original lecture notes (1: 347–69).

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INDEX

Abrams, M.H. 1, 3, 15, 16, 49, 64, 70, 72 advertising 34–5, 37–8, 139 aesthetic encounter, see literature, experience of illusion, see illusion animation 23, 27–8, 30–1, 34, 42 , 52 , 53, 82 , 146 Anselm 121, 123 Aquinas 80, 82 , 105 Aristotle 15, 45, 52 , 64, 80, 82 associationism 45–6 Auden, W.H. 133 Augustine 84–6, 91, 94, 105, 115–16, 121, 123, 136–7, 143, 148 author 98–9 Barth, J. Robert 85, 105, 106 beauty 19, 81, 87, 134 belief 7, 14, 33, 36, 48–9, 51–2, 61, 64, 66–7, 76–8, 89–96, 110–11, 114, 122–3, 139, 148 Berry, Wendell 15, 40–1, 62, 90–1, 96, 97, 100, 102–3, 109, 110–12, 140–1, 145, 146, 150 Bible, The Holy 43, 76–9, 85–6, 88, 89, 91–5, 105, 106, 114–15, 116, 142

Blake, William 117, 131, 142 Böhme, Jakob 116–17, 119, 120, 122 Boyle, Nicholas 40–1 Branch, Lori 15, 16 Brooks, Cleanth 1 Buber, Martin 104 Burwick, Frederic 5, 7–8, 15, 17, 46, 105 Carlyle, Thomas 79–80, 87 Chesterton, G.K. 141–2 , 143 Clinton, Hillary 15, 55, 64 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 33, 37, 61, 63, 65–6, 73–6, 109–10, 112, 114, 115–16, 122–3, 124–9, 134, 135, 137, 142, 145–8 dramatic works Remorse 5, 17 Zapolya 125 on “Poetic Faith” 68–9, 71, 76, 86, 88, 89, 112–13, 145 poetic works “An Autograph on an Autopergameme” 89, 106 “Fears in Solitude” 94, 122 “Fire, Famine and Slaughter” 106 “Frost at Midnight” 33, 62

168

INDEX

“Kubla Kahn” 65 Religious Musings 74–5 “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” 3, 16, 98 prose works Aids to Reflection 63, 71, 73, 79, 80, 83–8, 87, 92, 94, 97, 100, 115–16, 120–2 Biographia Literaria 1, 3–4, 15, 48, 64, 73, 76, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88–103, 104, 113, 124–32 , 141, 145–6 “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit” 78, 121 “Essay on Faith” 78, 79, 115 The Friend 82–3, 88, 93–4, 98–9 Lay Sermons 73, 128 “On St. Paul’s Defi nition of Faith” 78, 82 On the Constitution of Church and State 10, 63, 73 Opus Maximum 78 Philosophical Lectures 97, 104 The Statesman’s Manual 73, 81–2 , 94–5, 105, 107 The Watchman 10 on Shakespeare 6–7, 8, 65–6, 150–1, 152 on “willing suspension of disbelief” 1–4, 14–15, 43–51, 54, 61, 65–6, 76, 88, 89, 112–13, 145 collaboration 65, 69, 98–9, 112 , 121, 126–8, 139, 146 community formation 2 , 40–3, 53, 56, 59–60, 98, 100–2 , 140, 145–7, 150 contemplation 80 conversion, see individual transformation

covenant 114–17, 118, 140, 148, 149 Cox, Jeffrey N. 21, 125, 129 Crane, Hart 111–12 critic 33, 34, 99–100, 126–8 , 149 critical vantage 12–13, 20–43, 46–7, 48 , 50, 53–6 , 60, 68 , 71, 109, 113, 124, 135, 147 Cruikshank, George 21–6, 30, 31–2 , 62 Dante 3, 16, 97, 118 delusion 45–7, 68–9, 96 desert, image of 14, 20, 31–2 , 34–5, 40, 43–4, 55–6, 69, 113 devil, image of 110, 112 , 115–16, 127, 129–32 , 134, 136, 148, 151 dialogue 135–6, 140, 145, 146 disbelief 50, 51–3, 61, 67–9, 77–8, 90–1, 95, 103, 113, 122–3, 128, 136, 140, 145 Donne, John 78, 105 dramatic illusion, see illusion dramatic model of reading 96–8, 126–8, 146, 149 dreaming 7–10, 17, 40, 48, 65–6, 139 Eagleton, Terry 2 , 20, 33–5, 37, 38, 41, 44, 47, 50, 55–8, 60, 89–90, 100–1, 139, 142 , 147 ecology 40–1, 54, 59–60, 142 , 144 Edmundson, Mark 2 , 38–9, 41 education 15, 83, 91, 94–5, 140–1, 146–51 Eliot, T.S. 16 experiment 120–3, 124, 126, 136–7, 140, 142 , 143

INDEX

faith 2 , 14, 50, 52–3, 61, 64, 66–8, 70–88, 88–9, 95–6, 106, 113–17, 119, 122–3, 143, 145, 148 and belief 76–88, 88–9 and reason 75–88, 104, 113–14, 120–3, 148, 151 “For the Moment” 50, 117–20, 123, 135, 137 Foucault, Michel 34 Frank, Thomas 37–8 French Revolution 10, 21–3, 62 , 125 Gallagher, Catherine 2 , 5, 20, 44, 49–51, 59–61, 72 , 79, 89, 90, 100–1, 117, 119, 131, 135, 137, 143, 147–8 Gilmartin, Kevin 21, 29, 62 Greenblatt, Stephen 2 , 10–14, 30, 38, 68, 90, 100–2 , 143, 147–8 Hazlitt, William 11–13, 17, 30, 69, 73, 104, 128, 143 Herder, Johann Gottfried 7, 9, 61 hermeneutics of generosity 135–6, 138–40 hermeneutics of suspicion 63, 68 Home, Henry 7–9, 61 Homer 23–5, 89, 97, 103 Hunt, Leigh 6, 11, 21, 22 , 24, 26–7, 29, 30, 32 , 36, 62 , 130, 132 illusion 4–5, 7, 17, 34, 36, 44–8, 51, 61, 65–6, 95–6, 105, 118–20, 132 , 134, 139, 140–2 , 146–50 imagination 73–5, 82 , 87, 104, 142 individual transformation 2, 38–40, 53, 56, 59–60, 70, 100–2, 137–8, 140, 145–7, 150

169

ironic credulity 50–1, 53–4, 59–60, 147 John Paul II 148, 151 Johnson, Samuel 44, 46–7 Kant, Immanuel 76, 79–81, 84, 87, 95, 105 Kastan, David Scott 110–11, 113–17, 119, 131–2 , 140, 142 , 148 Keats, John 32 , 72 , 85, 96 Kenny, Anthony 75–6, 79 language 31, 93–5, 98 Lewis, C.S. 19, 103, 104, 106, 112 , 118, 133, 138, 141 literary theory 1, 3, 5, 7, 19, 30–2 , 33–4, 45, 54, 56, 60–1, 63, 66, 109–10, 113, 118, 138, 140–2 , 146, 147 literature experience of 12 , 37, 47–8, 51, 55, 69, 109–10, 112 , 117–23, 146 goods of 7, 12 , 15, 19–20, 38–43, 59–61, 69–70, 100–2 , 109, 133, 135–6, 140, 145–51 love 69, 74–5, 80, 147, 151 McCoy, Richard 5, 66, 68–73, 75–6, 79, 88–9, 95, 103, 111, 113–14, 119, 120, 142 McFarland, Thomas 1–2 , 96 McGann, Jerome 20, 32–4, 37–8, 41–3, 47, 50, 60, 69, 72 , 89, 97, 100–1, 135, 147 Marxism 32 , 37, 73 Maturin, Charles 15, 124–32 Bertram 15, 124–32 , 135, 143 Mee, Jon 117 Mikado 120

170

INDEX

Milton, John 74, 80, 83, 105, 115, 118, 128, 152 Monta, Susannah Brietz 5, 51–4, 60–1, 64, 75, 104, 109 monuments 23–8, 30–3 Moody, Jane 4, 11, 17, 143 Muir, Edwin 132 Nelson, Admiral Horatio 25–8, 31–2, 36, 62, 103, 148 New Historicism 10–14, 17, 20, 37, 41–3, 49–51, 68, 70–1, 100–1, 109, 147–8 Newman, John Henry 73, 104 Nuttall, A.D. 137 Olympics, 2012 Opening Ceremony 13–14, 17, 18 The Onion 58–9, 69, 72 , 119 Perry, Seamus 63, 105 Pieper, Josef 63, 80, 82 , 83–4, 97 Plato 19–20, 115–16, 149 play-within-a-play 5–7, 30, 110–11, 120, 131 poetic faith 14 , 61, 64 , 66–76 , 86–8 , 89, 93–105, 110 , 112–15, 117–19, 121, 123 , 124–6 , 128 , 131–2 , 134–7, 138–9, 140 , 142 , 145–51 postcolonialism 10–11, 13–14, 18, 63 postsecularism 3, 15, 61, 73, 87 power 7, 8–14, 20–39, 45, 47, 56, 70–1, 102–3, 109–13, 119–20, 131–2 , 133, 134–7, 145–7, 150 prayer 13, 76–8, 101, 105 Priestley, Joseph 45–6, 80 psychagogia 19–20, 109, 139, 146, 151 purgatory 12–13, 31, 42 , 101

reason and understanding 76, 79–81, 85, 87–8, 87–8, 89–96, 105, 122 , 123 Richards, I.A. 2 , 15, 48–9, 142 Roman Catholicism 13, 93–4, 107, 136, 143, 151 Romantic period politics 10, 11–12 , 16, 20–32 , 124–6, 129, 145–6 religion 2 , 16, 73, 117, 142 theater 4–5, 11–12 , 16–17, 124–6, 143 Ruoff, Gene 49–50 Said, Edward 10, 12 Schiller, Friedrich 7–9 Schlegel, A.W. 7–9, 17 Schumacher, E.F. 85, 149–50 Shakespeare, William 20, 46–7, 65, 68, 98, 101–2 , 102 , 104, 114–15, 119, 128 Hamlet 12–13, 42 , 65, 66–7, 71, 91, 96, 100, 101, 103, 112 King Lear 65, 89, 92 , 97, 110–11, 115, 123, 130–1 MacBeth 125, 139 Othello 65, 70, 72 , 75, 87, 112 , 120, 125 The Tempest 4–7, 8, 9–14, 20, 29, 30, 31, 82 , 100, 101–3, 109–10, 117, 119, 125, 129, 146, 150–1, 152 The Winter’s Tale 51–4, 55, 70, 71–2 , 75, 87, 99, 111, 113–14, 117, 120, 130, 136 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 34, 36, 37, 41, 42 , 53, 62 , 85, 89, 128, 134, 143, 149 dramatic works The Cenci 130 poetic works Adonais 32 , 85 “England in 1819” 31, 62

INDEX

“Mask of Anarchy” 21, 22–3 “Memory” 119, 135 “Ozymandias” 20, 24, 27, 29–33, 36, 38, 40, 42 , 43, 45, 47, 52 , 62 , 70, 72 , 89, 90, 103, 104, 109, 119, 122 , 132 , 139, 147 Prometheus Unbound 32 , 40 “When the lamp is shattered” 118 prose works “A Defence of Poetry” 30, 32 , 149 Southey, Robert 27–8, 31, 32 , 34, 37, 70 Steiner, George 67, 104 Taylor, Charles 60 theology 40, 54, 57, 64, 68, 70–1, 73–88, 97, 102 , 110, 113, 118, 120–3, 133, 141, 143, 145, 148–9, 151 Tolkien, J.R.R. 15, 53, 109, 113, 127, 132–3, 137, 141–2 , 143, 144, 145–6, 147 The Hobbit 39–40, 52 , 60, 140, 149 The Lord of the Rings 39, 132–41 “Mythopoeia” 138 “On Fairy Stories” 54–5, 57, 58, 60–1, 64, 139, 141–2 , 146 Trelawney, Edward John 42 , 53, 60, 147

171

vision 69, 79, 83–4, 91–3, 96–7, 99–101, 106, 112 Wallace, David Foster 139, 148–9 Weil, Simone 103 Wellek, René 80, 81, 87, 115 Wellington, Duke of 21, 23–7, 31–2 , 62 , 70, 72 , 103, 139, 147 Wheeler, Kathleen 1 will 46–8, 115, 133, 135 willing resumption of disbelief 14, 118–23, 124, 126–32 , 135–6, 140–2 , 146–7, 150–1 willing suspension of disbelief 1–4, 14–15, 19–20, 43–55, 57, 60–1, 64, 65–9, 71, 75, 76, 79, 84, 88–9, 89–96, 97, 103, 109–10, 112–14, 118, 119, 126, 134–5, 138, 139, 141–2 , 143, 145–6, 149 wizard, image of 6–7, 9–10, 13–14, 19–20, 23, 29, 32 , 39–40, 45, 53, 70, 101–3, 109–10, 133–42 , 146–7, 150 wonder 13, 19–20, 23, 39, 69, 109, 135–42 , 150–1 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 23–4, 35–6, 40, 53, 72 , 90, 102 , 109, 139, 148 Wordsworth, William 3, 27, 30–1, 46, 48, 57, 91, 128, 143