British Romanticism and the Archive: Loss, Archives and Spectrality 9783110775556, 9783110775501

Table of contents :
Acknowledgement
Contents
I Introduction
II Theory
III Spatial Archives: Mourning and Melancholia
IV The Subject as Archive
V The Poem as Archive: Aesthetics, Genre and Writing
VI Afterword: Romantic Archive Fever and Beyond
VII Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

David Kerler British Romanticism and the Archive

Buchreihe der Anglia / ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Andrew James Johnston, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Ad Putter, James Simpson, Emily Thornbury, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Liliane Louvel, Christopher Morash, Susana Onega, Martin Puchner, Peter Schneck

Volume 77

David Kerler

British Romanticism and the Archive Loss, Archives and Spectrality

ISBN 978-3-11-077550-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-077555-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-077562-4 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931210 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgement Writing a book on archives, “archive fever” and melancholia in British Romanticism has been a long, rewarding journey. This project was written under the guidance of Martin Middeke, who supported my academic career from its very beginning on. I am immensely grateful for his manifold support, motivation, critical feedback and important impulses. I also want to sincerely thank my two other supervisors, Christoph Reinfandt and Günter Butzer, for their support, careful reading of the manuscript in its different stages and fruitful feedback. This projected started as a case study on William Wordsworth’ “Lucy Gray”, which I presented at the conference “The Romantic Medium: Language and Lexicon” at the University of Oxford in 2013. I would like to heartily thank the organizers and participants for giving me the opportunity to present and discuss my work at an early stage. For stimulating discussions, ideas, inspiration and/or collaborations from which my work benefited in manifold ways I want to thank Timo Müller, Gerald Farca, Christopher Stokes, Christoph Henke (who sadly passed away in 2018), Miquel de Palol, Adina Sorian, Wolfgang Funk, Gerold Sedlmayr, Pascal Fischer, Mireia Aragay, Enric Monforte, Verónica Rodríguez and the participants of the Augsburg Oberseminar. I would also like to extend my thanks to the editors of De Gruyter / the Anglia Book Series for publishing the present book, and Oxford University Press for kindly granting to reprint a text extract of my article on Wordsworth and “archive fever” published in the journal English in 2017. Finally, I want to thank Danielle Breslin for the careful and thorough proof reading of the final manuscript. My most heartfelt thanks go to my wife Julia and my children, Vincent and Olivia, for their love, (emotional) support and – not least – patience.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-001

For Julia, Vincent and Olivia

Contents I

Introduction

II    . . .

Theory 14 The Archive and the Mid-18th to Early 19th Century 14 35 Loss, Melancholia, the Archive and Spectrality Archives 45 (Imagined) Spaces and Objects 45 The Melancholic Subject 54 61 Poetic Form and Materialities

III 

Spatial Archives: Mourning and Melancholia 72 Lost Spaces and Spaces of Loss: Wordsworth, Clare and Lord 72 Byron The Archive and the Motif of Journey 90 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient 91 Mariner” Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 102 Archiving the Infinite: Sublime Spaces in William Wordsworth’s 110 “Nutting” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”

 . . 

IV   V  . .  . . 

1

The Subject as Archive 126 Conceiving the Thing: William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” and the 126 Lucy-Poems Archiving Melancholia: John Keats’s Odes 138 The Poem as Archive: Aesthetics, Genre and Writing 168 Re-Writing the Male Archive 168 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Inscription for an Ice-House” 170 Charlotte Smith, “Beachy Head” (1807) 177 Genre and Archive Fever 194 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and the Sonnet 195 The Fragment: Coleridge’s “Christabel” 202 Writing, Print and the Archive: William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley 221

X

Contents

VI

Afterword: Romantic Archive Fever and Beyond

VII

249 Works Cited Primary Sources 249 Secondary Sources 253

Index

270

240

I Introduction The present book takes its cue from a rather marginal yet fundamentally significant note in Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever”. Reflecting on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, or on the “archivization of psychoanalysis itself” (Derrida 1995: 16 – 17), Derrida asks whether the psychic apparatus [is] better represented or is it affected differently by all the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction, for prostheses of so-called live memory, for simulacrums of living things which already are, and will increasingly be, more refined, complicated, powerful than the “mystic pad” (microcomputing, electronization computerization, etc.)? (Derrida 1995: 16)

The crucial observation made by Derrida in this passage attributes a significant influence to the media-technical materiality of archives, i. e. not only does it affect the archival structure of objects, their de- and recontextualisation, but also how we (discursively) apprehend and thus co-construct those very objects. “[T]he archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general”, Derrida contends, “is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past […] [n]o, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future” (1995: 17); “[t]here is no archive […] without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority” (1995: 14). What influence, then, has the archive on the cultural‐aesthetic output of a historical period that is characterised by rapid technological developments which catalysed the construction of numerous (new) archives and archival practices? And how does the archive’s (de)constructive structure – the conflation of storage and effacement, of presence and absence, to which Derrida refers ambivalently with his concept of the troubled archive, le mal d’archive – affect those literary-aesthetic archival practices and discourses?

Note: Parts and ideas of this chapter (ch. I) were previously published by De Gruyter: Kerler, David. “Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats”. Anglia 138:3 (2020): 355 – 383. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-002

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Long before the digital age with its alleged¹ potential and unlimited capacity for the storing of data as well as its diffusion, accessing information anytime and anywhere through the Internet, of constructing (the public archive of) one’s own identity via Facebook or Instagram, the Romantic period anticipated many contemporary archival issues and paradoxes. It is most notably around the mid-18th to early 19th century in Britain which constitutes a remarkable time span in this regard as its numerous modernising processes (technological, societal, political, scientific, cultural, media etc.) culminate in a large variety of archives, archival practices/techniques and, not least, in a multi‐layered discursive appropriation of the latter. To take some examples which I will further explicate and problematise in the course of this study: starting in the Age of Enlightenment, the founding of several new scientific disciplines and their subsequent institutionalisation required manifold archives and archiving techniques in order to process, organise and store an increasing accumulation of knowledge. The prevalent trend of individually collecting objects such as plants, minerals or insects (Drayton 1998: 238 – 239), delighting their owners in the “possessive satisfaction they gave” (Drayton 1998: 238) and most prominently reflected by 18th century antiquarianism with its feverish quest for lost objects of the past (Sweet 2004: XV; Grimes 2012: 33 – 34), was eventually complemented (if not replaced) by an increasing number of professionalised sciences,² marking a shift from the private realm to public collections. Within this context, it was the flourishing of the print and publishing industry/culture of the late 18th to 19th century that provided the material basis for archiving (scientific) knowledge and for making it accessible to broader audiences (e. g. magazines and periodicals, historiographic works, or numerous dictionaries and encyclopaedias).³ Historiography took a decisively material turn during these developments inasmuch as it was now based on a “xerographical” (Wolfgang Ernst qtd. in Kelley and Lynch 2018: 4) concept of the past, i. e. primarily relying on documents and artefacts (Kelley and Lynch

 For a critical perspective on the notion of a “total archive” in the digital age, see Lynch (2018: 113 – 114): “current discussions of digital memory sometimes appear invested in the myth that the Internet combined with networked computers forms a recurrently regenerated ‘automated archive.’ Ignoring our daily frustrations with broken links and disappearing content, those who point to the infinite storage space associated with digital cultures sometimes sound as though they anticipate a new archival dawn in which, dematerialized, record-keeping will no longer be dogged by gaps or absences.”  See Drayton (1998: 244); Jarvis (2004: 100); Sweet (2004: XVI); Sweet (2001: 182); Grimes (2012: 36 – 37).  See, exemplarily, Belanger (1982: 6 – 7); Feather (2006: 98 – 99); Flieger and Schoenfield (2012: 72); Duff (2015: 189); Haekel (2015).

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2018: 4). As Walter J. Ong points out, this transition from orality to print coincides precisely with the turn of the Romantic period: The Romantic Movement marked by the beginning of the end of rhetoric as a major academic and cultural force in the West. The Romantic Age took form with the maturing of knowledge storage and retrieval processes made possible by print. These processes had produced a store of readily retrievable knowledge greater than had ever before been possible. Print had effectively reduced sound to surface, hearing to vision. Despite the fact that it was verbally constituted and ultimately tied to the oral world, the store of knowledge accumulated in print was no longer managed by repetitive, oral techniques, but by visual means, through print, tables of contents, and indices. Knowledge was tied not to spoken words but to texts. This separated the knowledge from the lived world. (Ong 2012: 296 – 297)

The “new age of paper” (Stauffer 2006: para. 8) was both accompanied and advantaged by technological innovations (e. g. the Fourdrinier machines or the steam powered cylinder press in the early 19th century) and legal improvements (such as the abolishment of shared copyright and the introduction of limited copyright instead), overall resulting in the publication of countless periodicals, magazines and books (Belanger 1982: 20 – 23; Feather 2006: 86 – 96, 129 – 130). Within this extended range of distribution and with rapidly growing audiences, a new “aesthetics of celebrity” (Flieger Samuelian and Schoenfield 2012: 71) emerged (Flieger Samuelian and Schoenfield 70 – 74; Gamer 2017) in which (Romantic) writers cultivated their own public (and performative) archives of the self. Finally, this expansion of knowledge ran parallel with the expansion of the British Empire (Drayton 1998: 237– 238), which saw to various archaeological expeditions being undertaken throughout this era. The countless cultural artefacts that were gathered during those expeditions, in turn, were archived in museums and galleries, established precisely during the time frame indicated, e. g. the British Museum in 1753, the Louvre in 1793 or the National Portrait Gallery in 1824 (Bennett 2002: 19; Underwood 2012: 238 – 239). Given the extensive construction of the archives referred to, however, it appears paradoxical that these developments were to coincide with an increasing awareness of loss. The latter appears, especially (but not exclusively) within the context of the period’s print culture, for example, in (1) an uncontrollable proliferation of archives, i. e. an incommensurability arising from the sheer amount of documents/objects, and/or (2) an anxiety regarding their precarious materiality

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(such as decaying paper or fading colours).⁴ In a more abstract sense, the delineated developments together with the manifestation of an anxious desire to archive must also be considered in light of the period’s significant experiencing of loss, i. e. as an “affective substrate of these revolutionary times” (Kelley 2018: 143): that is, the prevalent sense of loss should be considered a result of the subject’s experience of acceleration/temporalisation⁵ and estrangement in view of, for instance, the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution (in particular, processes of urbanisation and the Enclosure Movement), the awareness of a general metaphysical crisis or the sobering aftermaths of the French Revolution.⁶ As Theresa M. Kelley (2018: 144) notes in this regard, “[a]lthough the Romantics were not the first, nor we the last, to understand that archives are or can be fragile, the precarity of their era sharpened the odds that one could lose what one had hoped to preserve.” *** Against this backdrop, I can now further specify the book’s argument. Taking my starting point from the Derridean notion of le mal d’archive, I seek to explore the complex interrelations between the experience of loss, the phenomenon of melancholia, the archive and their (self‐)destructive tendencies, surfacing in different forms of spectrality, in selected poetry from the late-18th to the mid-19th century. It will be argued that the British Romantics were highly influenced by the period’s archival fever – manifesting itself in various historical, material, technological and cultural aspects – and (implicitly) reflected and engaged with these discourses and materialities/medialities in their works. These comprise (discursive traces in) aspects such as themes/motifs, aesthetics, archival ideologies and metapoetical issues that deal with genre and language as archiving media, and the very materiality of the poems, i. e. the materiality of sound, print and writing. At the centre of my theoretical considerations and literary analyses is the paradoxical double movement of the archive, which Derrida hints at through the ambivalence of the original French title of his essay, le mal d’archive (1995): Read as ‘suffering from archive fever’ (see, for example, Derrida 1995: 9, 19, 54, 57), the concept refers to the subject’s feverish desire to archive, surfacing in a yearning to possess the original object in its

 See Stauffer (2006: para. 3 and 14) for the archival anxieties regarding the period’s print culture; Kelley (2018: 162– 163).  See, for example, Fricke (2009: 11– 14) or, in a more general context, Rosa (2012: 71– 88) and Koselleck (2004: 268 – 270).  For the period’s sense of loss, see, exemplarily, Benziger (1962: 10, 17); Jarvis (2004: 124) or Anselm (1990: 16 – 29).

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totality, an impulse to gather objects and construct archives. In its extreme form, this desire can emerge as a melancholic yearning for the absolute origin qua compulsive acts of archiving, i. e. (partly deferred) acts of incorporation of the lost (original, maternal) object. While this appropriation of Derrida’s concept primarily describes a psychological category, the original French title also conveys the meaning ‘the archive’s fever; the sickness of the archive’, pointing to the self‐destructive, mainly material, aspects inherent to the archive (see, for example, Derrida 1995: 14, 53 – 54, 56 – 59). These involve, for example, the precarious materiality of archival media (paper, print, writing, physical repositories, language etc.), their destructive power structures together with processes of selection and sortation, or processes of de- and recontextualisation. At the same time, the archive’s (self‐)destructive thrust can also be extended to psychoanalytical readings, i. e. as a compulsive re-enactment of the affect of loss: that is, the perpetual reconstruction and destruction of the lost object within (and of) these archives corresponds to the melancholic’s compulsive fixation on the lost object – a reenactment of the “very […] gesture of its loss” (Žižek 2000: 660) which provides an ambivalent, melancholic pleasure (Žižek 2000: 658 – 663), arising from the archived object’s presence within its absence. Within the framework of this new theoretical and material/cultural perspective, the study aims to recontextualise and shed light on both the historical-cultural developments outlined as well as the literary aesthetic features of the Romantic period. By tracing the material and discursive influences of archives/archival processes in paradigmatic Romantic poems, details and coherence previously gone unnoticed shall be laid bare, ultimately contributing to a new and more profound understanding of these texts and British Romanticism(s). It will be shown that the various discursive and material manifestations of archives and archival practices – comprising the feverish, at times melancholic, desire to archive as well as the archive’s (de)constructive structure – not only echo the period’s technological‐cultural and historical developments along with its incisive experiencing of loss, but also fundamentally determine Romantic subjectivity and aesthetics. In so doing, the Romantics’ archive fever poses a challenge to what Jerome McGann (1983) has labelled the “romantic ideology”, (self-critically) exposing the profound embeddedness of Romanticism within the materialhistorical realities of its time. *** In recent years, the (historical) description and analysis of archives, their characteristics and functions as well as the very concept of “the archive”, have flourished as an object of study in the humanities. As a result of numerous interdisciplinary approaches together with the application of their respective methods

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and specialisations, the scope of the concept differs widely. The historian Markus Friedrich (Die Geburt des Archivs: Eine Wissensgeschichte, 2013), for example, stresses that the history of the archive is the history of our (culture of) knowledge, locating its origins in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age.⁷ Other studies, such as the articles in the volume What are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (ed. Louis Craven, 2008), focus on the cultural‐technological context of archives in the 21st century⁸ and diagnose an “archival impulse” confronted with a “failure in cultural memory” (Foster 2004: 21) in the postmodern era (Foster 2004: 21– 22). Relatedly, poststructuralist studies emphasise the textuality of archives and the related processes of de- and recontextualisation, critically questioning the (im)possibility of fixing meaning and constructing a “total” archive, i. e. a comprehensive and conclusive archive (see for example Prescott 2008 or Nesmith 2002). Michel Foucault’s appropriation of the concept largely discards its material dimension and focuses on its discursive performativity and power structures instead: the archive in the Foucauldian sense constitutes the discursive a priori that legitimises discourse and makes it possible in the first place (2002b: 145 – 148). Other studies scrutinise the nexus between (immaterial) social-cultural memory and material archives, such as Francis Blouin’s and William G. Rosenberg’s edited volume Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory (2007) or Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds.), Refiguring the Archive (2002), which traces the role of archives in view of the (re)construction of South Africa’s colonial past and postcolonial present (see, in a wider sense, also Ward/Wisnicki 2019 and their observations regarding the postcolonial digital archive). These books illustrate the extent to which archives and their archived material fulfil a performative function by contributing to the construction of collective identity/identities.⁹ Concomitant with this extension to cultural memory (e. g. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume) and cultural history (e. g. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History), the concept of the archive comes to be eventually associated with mnemonic processes (see e. g. Harris 2002) and/or conceived of as a psychoanalytical category (Derrida 1995; Van Zyl 2002). Alongside these works, which engage with the concept of the archive explicitly, there are also numerous cultural-historic studies that explore concrete archives and archival processes (both in a narrow and wider sense) during Britain’s 18th to early 19th century. These comprise, for example, the role of science and its institutionalisation (e. g. Drayton 1998;

 See also Staub (2016) for the history of the archive in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age.  Regarding the digital age, see, exemplarily, Moss (2008); Stevenson (2008); Lubar (1999).  See, in particular, Craven (2008: 8); Mbembe (2002: 20) and Lubar (1999: 16).

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Kelley 2012a; Jarvis 2004), the “Birth of the Museum” (Bennett 2002), visual‐material culture (Thomas 2012), antiquarianism,¹⁰ or the booming print and publishing industry.¹¹ The period’s various experiences of loss are likewise sufficiently documented, most notably in the case of the consequences following from the French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, the Enclosure Movements¹² and the general awareness of a metaphysical crisis.¹³ Despite recent scholarly interest in archives, there are almost no larger studies that further differentiate and operationalise Derrida’s concept of le mal d’archive for the purposes of literary analysis,¹⁴ especially for the literature and aesthetics of the Romantic period. Yet Derrida’s “Archive Fever” proves to be especially advantageous for such issues since it not only addresses the (de)constructive nature of archives/archival processes (the so-called troubled archive) but also takes the archiving subject into account, i. e. their fever to archive, providing many possible (theoretical-methodical) links to cultural phenomena and experiences of (melancholic) loss. Noticeable exceptions with regard to British Romanticism are Andrew Stauffer’s article “Romanticism’s Scattered Leaves” (2006) and the recently published special issue of Studies in Romanticism, “The Matter of the Archive” (eds. Theresa M. Kelley and Deidre Shauna Lynch, 2018). Stauffer relates the Derridean “archive fever” to England’s print and publishing industry in the 18th and early 19th centuries. He reads the topos of “scattered leaves” in selected examples of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats as a cypher for Romantic archival anxieties surrounding the precarious materiality of paper during the time of industrial mass production. The articles in Kelley’s and Lynch’s volume approach the phenomenon of the archive in the Romantic period from different critical perspectives (among them New Materialism and, not least, Derrida’s Archive Fever) in various cultural manifestations (such as objects at the Foundling Hospital, albums/scrapbooks or afterlives of dress). Overall, the essays attest to the central aspects of my general thesis, namely that “in the Romantic period especially, the impulse to organise and preserve is bound up, in an intricate contrapuntal

 See, exemplarily, Sweet (2004); Grimes (2012); or Sweet (2001).  See, for example, Flieger and Schoenfield (2012); Belanger (1982); Feather (2006); or Gamer (2017).  See, exemplarily, Mingay (1990); Snell (1985); or Chambers (1953).  See, exemplarily, Benziger (1962); Anselm (1990); Abrams (1963); Fritzsche (2011); Pfau (2005); or Sedlmayr (2011).  In the context of journal articles, nevertheless, the concept has been applied, for example, to analyse Samuel Beckett’s Watt (Lozier 2013) or H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon and the “Empire of Ants” (Murphy 2015).

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relation, with a contrasting set of impulses, including the propensity to mourn– or to become enchanted by– the waywardness of objects” (Kelley and Lynch 2018: 5). However, the volume has a strong focus on cultural studies and thus largely disregards (with some relatively brief exceptions) a close analysis of Romantic literary texts. There is also no further terminological-theoretical differentiation and extension (e. g., to the phenomenon of melancholia) of Derrida’s archive concept for the purposes of literary analysis (a caveat that Stauffer’s article also lacks). This is, however, not detrimental to the volume’s overall quality but rather results from the nature of such collections of individual, discrete essays and their primary cultural‐historic scope. Finally, Jonathan Boulter’s full-length study Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (2011) must be mentioned given that it relates Derrida’s archive fever to the phenomenon of melancholy. While providing a starting point for the idea and theoretical implications of the melancholic “subject as archive”, there are some limitations to my focus on Romantic poetry since Boulter examines the contemporary novel (with a special focus on the trauma phenomenon) and his theoretical part consequently has different aims / a different theoretical scope. Regarding the various side issues that do not have an explicit connection to the notion of the archive (fever), such as (Romanticism and) melancholia, space/place, the sublime, concepts of imagination, aesthetics, genres, or the materialities of writing and print: it should be noted that there is a plethora of secondary literature, so much so that the state of research cannot be outlined at this point. Instead of succumbing to an archival fever myself, the broader state of research will be reflected implicitly through references in the relevant chapters. What can be said in this regard, however, is that these flanking aspects – both theoretically and specifically in concrete Romantic poems – have not yet been theoretically and systematically (re)considered through the specified lens of “archive fever”. *** To answer the outlined research questions, I shall first approach the concept/ phenomenon of the archive and then trace its varied material and discursive manifestations during the time span falling between the mid-18th to early-19th century (chapter II.1). What concerns me primarily in this chapter is not to establish a conclusive definition of “the archive” but rather to provide an overview of the forms in which archives (and their discourses) appear, further, to exemplify how they are used and what they do. At this point it suffices to say that, depending on the particular subject‐specific and methodic approach, the definitions and extensions of the concept vary eminently. Generally, “the archive” may

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refer to the place of archiving, the archiving medium or the archived material itself. The boundaries between material and immaterial archives as well as between material and immaterial archived objects turn out to be rather fluid, frequently inclusive of the archiving subject itself. In the subsequent chapters, I intend to go beyond Derrida’s original conception of “archive fever” by linking his ideas to the phenomenon of melancholia and to specific literary-aesthetic manifestations of the archive/archival practices, eventually operationalising the concept for the purpose of literary analysis. While chapter II.2. establishes the basic theoretical nexuses between the experience of loss, melancholia and the ambivalences of the Derridean concept of “archive fever” (i. e. suffering from a fever to archive, and the “trouble” of the archive due to its self‐destructive structure), chapter II.3. concretises three basic manifestations of my understanding of “archive fever” that are relevant for my subsequent literary analyses, each of them constituting a further abstraction of the previous one: Primarily drawing on Michail Bachtin’s Chronotopos, chapter II.3.1. explores how (real and imagined) spaces are archived in Romantic poetry, how they may function as spatial archives themselves (e. g. of memory, objects or artifacts), and the ways in which a (melancholic) sense of loss materialises in those acts of spatially archiving – a sense of loss that is both origin of the fever to archive as well as symptom of the archive’s destructiveness. This ambivalent double movement also functions as a determinant for the following chapter, “The Melancholic Subject” (II.3.2.), which focuses on the archiving subject’s psychology and melancholic disposition. Following from the work of Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Žižek and, in particular, Julia Kristeva on the subject of melancholia (Black Sun, 1992), I will use the concept of “archive fever” as a critical lens that will allow for a re-reading of the phenomenon. It will be argued that melancholy surfaces in many Romantic poems as a performative act of archiving in which the (lost) object’s incorporation and loss is compulsively re-enacted; the subject (as archive of this lost object) thus not only suffers from a feverish, melancholic desire to archive but also from the archive’s (self‐)destructive structure – a destructive genesis that ultimately results in a noticeable aesthetic creativity (most notably in the case of John Keats). Finally, I will scrutinise the extent to which poetic form itself constitutes a troubled archive, comprising Romantic concepts of imagination, issues of genre, and the materiality/mediality of language, print and writing (ch. II.3.3.). Although these three basic manifestations are analytically separated, for the sake of theoretical clarity, they are nonetheless intertwined in many ways as will be revealed in the subsequent interpretations of the literary texts.

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The three chapters which focus on text analysis are arranged both in thematic and abstracted order, tracing a (general) movement from content to form, from mourning to melancholia, and from subjectivity and non-materiality to the material dimension. By focusing on (literary) spaces as archives (ch. III), the archiving subject (ch. IV) and finally the poem as archive together with its materiality/mediality (ch. V), I intend to adequately reflect the multi-layered (and likewise interwoven) thematic aspects of “archive fever” in Romantic poetry and, further, to avoid any redundant application of one theoretical question onto one thematic aspect. Instead, the aim of the following literary analyses will be to explore the diverse implications of the notion of “archive fever” along with their various interconnections, to scrutinise the areas where these implications may be considered to challenge and/or exceed the limits of the outlined theoretical categories, and to trace the discursive and material links to contemporary archival practices and archives. To the same extent that the concept of the archive (fever) encompasses numerous medialities as well as discursive and (im)material manifestations and implications, the discursive and material traces in these poems are likewise varied. This arises, not least, from the fact that English “Romanticism” is an utterly heterogeneous movement (see e. g. Lovejoy 1924; Jarvis 2004: 149; Reinfandt 2003: 9 – 84) – a heterogeneity to which I want to do justice with my selection of paradigmatic texts and authors, but that nonetheless coincides (albeit in distinct forms and accentuation) with the notion of a shared “archive fever”. The first text-analytical chapter, “Spatial Archives: Mourning and Melancholia”, explores how (imagined) spaces function as archives, exposing a – in its most extreme form, melancholic – sense of loss that manifests itself both in a feverish desire to archive as well as in the (self‐)destructive nature of the archive. The chapter is subdivided into three thematic aspects, tracing increasing abstracted forms among those spatial archives. Chapter III.1. scrutinises how the loss of real spaces engenders an archiving of the same (or rather, their idealised memory) within art (John Clare), resulting in the construction of spatial archives which oscillate between sublimatory reconstruction and materialisations of such loss. This issue is extended to spatial archives that transcend their materiality by becoming archives of abstracted loss; in particular, time (William Wordsworth) and archival anxieties surrounding future loss, e. g. the anxiety of falling into oblivion (Lord Byron). While chapter III.2. reads the motif of journey as a self‐reflexive movement through spatial archives and their simultaneous (re‐)construction, during the course of which the subject’s melancholic disposition is explored and re‐enacted (Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), chapter III.3. focuses on sublime spaces as sites of melancholic loss, i. e.

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as constructions of spatial archives of the infinite through which the subjects performatively (and affectively) strive to return to the absolute origin. The analysis of various spatial archives in these three chapters thereby traces an increasing movement from spatial mourning to spatial melancholia, from sublimatory acts of archiving to (self‐)destructive‐melancholic archiving, eventually following through to the subsequent chapter in which I analyse “The Subject as Archive”. Closely entangled with an imaginative (re)construction of spatial archives – most notably in the case of sublime spaces, which are in their extreme form mere mental projections; e. g. in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (ch. III.3.) – is the issue of the subject as archive. The analyses in chapter IV focus on subjectivity of the lyrical I, scrutinizing the ways in which the subject becomes an archive in the face of melancholic loss. Drawing on the psychoanalytical theories discussed as well as their relation to the concept of “archive fever” (ch. II.3.2.), the melancholic’s compulsive attachment to the lost object will be conceived of as a feverish desire to archive. In conjunction with the (self‐)destructive quality of the archive (i. e. the “archive’s fever”) running parallel with this archival fever, it will be argued that the affect of loss is compulsively and performatively repeated in the course of these archival acts whereby the (lost) archived object describes a paradoxical presence/absence. This shall be exemplified in two related yet thematically distinct chapters: Using the example of William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” and the so‐called Lucy‐Poems (ch. IV. 1.), I will examine how Wordsworth tries to conceive and incorporate the abstract, unspeakable melancholic loss (which Julia Kristeva theoretically adumbrates as “the Thing” [Kristeva 1989: 13]) by poetically archiving the elusive, spectral figure of Lucy (Gray). The following chapter IV.2. argues that John Keats’s major odes and their aesthetics aim at both articulating and metapoetically conceiving the phenomenon/affect of melancholia, thereby frequently resorting to (media‐)cultural manifestations of archives, their materiality, archival practices and discourses. His odes (re‐)enact the melancholic affect as an ambivalent and destructive archival process – a (self‐)destructiveness that not only characterises the notion of the troubled archive but that also engenders a nobilitating sense of creativity. A further abstraction of the previous analyses, chapter V scrutinises “The Poem as Archive”, comprising questions of aesthetics, genre, print and writing together with their materiality and mediality. This will be shown in three key issues: Taking the example of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith (ch. V.1. “ReWriting the Male Archive”), the influence of archives and archival practices will be explored from the female perspective. I shall argue that Barbauld and Smith consider dominant forms of knowledge (historiography, scientific models of classification etc.) and aesthetics as primarily male archival practices/discourses

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which they (self‐)critically engage with in their poems. In doing so, the latter constitute both a manifestation of those archives/archival practices and at the same time a modification, supplementation of the dominant male archive. While Anna Barbauld engages in her “Inscription for an Ice-House” (ch. V.1.1.) – which, tellingly, features a repository as its main sujet – with male (Romantic) aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful, Charlotte Smith extends this focus on aesthetics to historiographical and scientific archival practices/discourses (ch. V.1.2.). As such, her poem “Beachy Head” not only archives those various archival discourses, but concomitantly develops a critical meta-commentary on them. Overall, it will be shown that the material texture of “Beachy Head” (as evidenced by its fragmentary structure and writing/print – both significantly constituted and self‐reflexively mirrored by the abounding endnotes) together with its coordination of various historical models, aesthetics and scientific classificatory systems exposes the contingency of the archival act. The following chapter (V.2.) traces the nexus between genre and archive fever in two paradigmatic examples: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (ch. V.2.1.) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (ch. V.2.2.). Against the backdrop of the 19th century’s revivification of the sonnet and the period’s flourishing print culture, I will argue that Shelley uses the sonnet genre in “Ozymandias” to explore contemporary archival concerns regarding language/writing (as archives) and the precarious materiality of paper/print (as a further archive of language/writing). These thematic concerns are complemented by an analysis of Coleridge’s “Christabel” and the (profoundly Romantic) genre of the fragment. Fragmentarily citing numerous genres (such as the ballad, romance, gothic or allegory), Coleridge critically revises generic frames of reference as literary, poetic archival structures along with the materiality of the written signifier in view of the period’s defining transition (Ong 2012: 296 – 297) from orality to print. The poem’s fragmentary form thereby echoes the paradoxical nature of the archive, its spectral presence/absence, in that it is located within the threshold of an implied yet ultimately absent totality (i. e. the fragment genre as a troubled archive) and as it simultaneously constitutes itself as an expression of the feverish desire for the potential of such totality. The book eventually concludes with a chapter focusing on writing and print together with their materiality/mediality in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”. Centering on the “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence (but also taking into account various other poems from the two volumes as well as Blake’s peculiar printing method and designs), I will argue that the “Introduction” allegorically sketches the media/material evolution towards writing and print, underpinning its conception with a strong sense of (material) loss. By such means, the poem’s

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texture exposes the opposition between an idealised, “innocent” (logocentric) conception of writing and its inherent differential nature (“experience”) – a field of tension that I will explore as a dialectical relation between the fever to archive and the archive’s fever, respectively. This dialectical relation is also a determining factor in – albeit in a different manifestation and thematical concern – for Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”. A fundamental text for Shelley’s philosophical thought and aesthetics, I shall argue that “Mont Blanc” establishes the juxtaposed yet (inter)related poles of idealistic epistemology and materialist ontology by resorting to (images and conceptions of) contemporary archival discourses and technologies. The sublime in “Mont Blanc” thereby functions as a second-order discourse – pointing to the limits of communication and archival systems by exposing the failure of the symbolic (the archive’s fever) in confrontation with the subject’s desire for completeness (the fever to archive) – and finally closes the thematic circle to the sublime spaces discussed in the first chapter.

II Theory 1 The Archive and the Mid-18th to Early 19th Century In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in the notion of the archive. Having been scrutinised from a multitude of critical angles, this iridescent concept has undergone considerable denotative and semantic extensions.¹⁵ In order to approximate and understand this complex phenomenon, we must first take a closer look at its most basic definition. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the archive as follows: 1. a place in which public records or historical documents are preserved; also the material preserved – often used in plural 2. a repository or collection especially of information¹⁶

The term not only denotes the archived material but also a specific place where that material is stored. As Jacques Derrida (1995: 9) further observes with regard to the word’s etymology, archive derives from the Greek word arkheion: “initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (1995: 9). He hereby identifies the archive by its physical qualities and its “nomological principle” (1995: 9), i. e. the guarding archons who ruled in their house/place by imposing their (identificatory, classificatory and eventually hermeneutic) law on the documents to be archived. In other words, the archive is inherently (and necessarily) characterised by power structures that profoundly determine its object(s).¹⁷ With that said, it becomes clear that the following questions require answers which strongly determine the very concept of the archive and its ensuing (power) structures: what can be considered material proper to the archive and where can such material

Note: Parts and ideas of chapter II (including subchapters) were previously published by De Gruyter: Kerler, David. “Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats”. Anglia 138:3 (2020): 355 – 383; Kerler, David. “Genre and Archive Fever in Romantic Poetry: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ’Ozymandias’ and the Sonnet”. In: David Kerler and Timo Müller (eds.). Poem Unlimited: New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019). 17 – 29.  For an overview, see also Fertig (2011).   Derrida (1995: 9 – 10, 17). See also Assmann (2006: 344– 345). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-003

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be archived? A brief outline of “the” archive’s various appropriations shall further elucidate this. First, and in the narrow sense of the word, an archive comprises several different types of documents or sources (e. g. texts, books, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, paintings, photographs, recordings, films or items) that are usually gathered into a corpus that comes to constitute the archive (in its material sense). These documents/sources are commonly preserved in buildings or repositories, such as museums or libraries, which in turn constitute the archive in its local sense. Within the academic context, such (collections of) documents and sources play an important role for archaeologists (e. g. the study of the archives of the ancient Greek, Roman or Byzantine) and historians, with increasing discussion among the latter pertaining to meta‐historiographic issues regarding the (re‐)construction of history through the use of such archives and the effects of their inherent power structures.¹⁸ A great number of documents/sources cited in the preceding paragraph are powerful archives in and of themselves. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias, for example, can be considered archives insofar as they are compilations of human knowledge (“[a]n encyclopaedia is always an attempt to summarize the whole of human knowledge”; Haekel 2015: 202). With the emergence of photography in the 19th century, a new kind of archive was introduced since it is both a fixed and visual representation of reality/the past¹⁹ and as such, came to represent a valuable document for the historian (Roth 2011b). Tracing the impact of photography, we can generally state that technological changes have brought about myriads of new (material) archives, such as the evolution of sound carriers, film and, most recently, the digital information age (having Ada Lovelace as a prominent forerunner) with its wide range of data storage devices and the Internet.²⁰ Finally, art and especially literature can act as archives in various ways in their attempts to timelessly fix/aestheticise a specific moment, impression, feeling, object, or even a person. In this regard one may think of the final lines in William Shakespeare’s sonnet 19 (“My love shall in my verse ever live young”), where art defies the destructive nature of time, or John Keats’s immortalisation of the two lovers in his ekphrastic “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Furthermore, a literary text’s intertextuality constitutes a powerful repository of cultural

 See Craven (2008: 12– 13) for the role of archives in the academic context. For the archive in the Antiquity, see also Rebenich (2016).  See Roth (2011a) for the possibilities and limitations of photography for representing the past.  For the role of the archive in the digital information age, see, for example, Moss (2008); Stevenson (2008: 89 – 106); or Lubar (1999).

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memory (Lachmann 1990: 34– 38), whereby intertextual references can be interpreted as acts of archiving in which former texts are accumulated and (re‐)organised. In a further abstraction, the archive is also able to transcend its own materiality by (implicitly) referring to social/cultural memory and/or exposing dominant power structures. This is illustrated, for instance, by Aby M. Warburg (1866 – 1929) with his concept of the so-called pathos formula, demonstrating how specific Renaissance paintings memorise cultural symbols “beyond” the surface of their actual artistic depiction, thus functioning as archives of collective memory (Erll 2005: 19 – 21). Moving beyond a focus on singular documents, various recent studies explore archives en bloc (i. e. collections of documents and sources) as implicit repositories of cultural/social memory.²¹ In this appropriation of the concept, the archive also fulfils a performative function insofar as it not only records memory/history/culture but also constructs it to a certain degree, thus actively partaking in the formation of (collective) identity (Lubar 1999: 14– 16; Craven 2008: 8 – 12; see also the essays in Blouin and Rosenberg 2007, especially Cook 2007). This goes hand in hand with a focus on its implicit power structures, mainly arising from problems of selection,²² its fictions of totality and order (Mbembe 2002: 19 – 21), and, ultimately, from language²³ itself. These aspects are eventually taken to the extreme in Michel Foucault’s appropriation of the archive. Rather than interpreting the latter as a collection of documents and/or the (archiving) institution(s), Foucault’s concept comprises the discursive a priori (2002b: 145 – 148), i. e. “the general system of the formation and transfor “archives are about identity, heritage and culture” (Craven 2008: 8); “We are our archives. Our archives, our memories, reflect our world” (Lubar 1999: 16).  “The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’. The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status” (Mbembe 2002: 20). See also in this context Assmann (2006: 345 – 346) and Foucault (2002a: 9 – 22), who exposes discursive power structures in relation to the construction of an author with his concept of the author function (2002a: 15), such as the classificatory influence of the author’s name (2002a: 12– 16) or the control of a text’s meaning: “the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill the work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; […] The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (2002a: 21– 22).  See Craven (2008: 14– 15), Prescott (2008: 31– 52) and Nesmith (2002: 24– 41), who explore (the study of) archives in relation to poststructuralist language philosophy. Based on the archive’s (inter)textuality, these studies emphasise language’s inability to fully control meaning and its context(s). For issues arising from de- and recontextualisations of the linguistic sign in general, see Culler (1999: 136 – 144).

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mation of statements” (2002b: 146). Substantially stripped from its materiality, the Foucauldian archive exclusively refers to discursive power structures that make statements possible in the first place.²⁴ Finally, the archive is associated with memory and the attendant processes of remembering: “To remember is to archive. To archive is to preserve memory.”²⁵ This can be seen in the way that metaphors of memory are related to notions of the archive. The abstract idea of memory is traditionally visualised by the metaphor of stacks (rhetorical mnemonics) or that of the wax tablet (Plato) in western civilisation. Whereas the former emphasises the aspect of storage, the latter foregrounds the act of archiving, namely carving the respective remembrance into its archiving medium, the wax tablet (Butzer 2005: 11– 12). Two aspects are especially worthy of note: firstly, both are spatial metaphors, particularly the stacks metaphor and its various permutations, such as the temple, theatre, library or house (Butzer 2005: 11; Birk 2003: 88 – 89). These spatial metaphors also implicitly entail the archive’s inherent power structures as the repositories mentioned are fundamentally governed by principles of selection and organisation (Birk 2003: 89). In addition, the association between memory and space can transcend its metaphorical status as soon as the latter acts as externalised, material supplements of memory. That is, (real) places or spaces that are associated with particular (individual or collective) memories (e. g. graveyards, monuments, historically important localities) constitute powerful archives describing a nexus between materiality and immateriality (Assmann 2006: 298 – 300, 322– 328, 337– 339; Nora 2005). Secondly, the metaphor of writing proves to be the decisive paradigm for the notion of memory, let alone for the archive, having been associated with writing from the beginning on (Assmann 2006: 343). With regard to memory, the writing metaphor has been used from antiquity until today (including recent memory studies) and it is, most notably, able to reflect the counterside of memory: forgetting (Birk 2003: 88; Butzer 2005: 14).²⁶ This (self‐)destructive element of memory is, for instance, brought to light by the palimpsest metaphor (Thomas De Quincey) or Sigmund Freud’s mystic pad as they both visualize

 “The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” (Foucault 2002b: 145); “it [the archive; D.K.] is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning” (Foucault 2002b: 146).  Harris (2002: 75). See also Steedman (2001: 66 – 83) for a critical evaluation of the conception of memory as an archive and vice versa.  As Butzer (2005: 22) further outlines, metaphors of forgetting are crucially based on the respective metaphors of memory, such as wastelands and graves within spatial metaphors or the image of tabula rasa within the waxtablet metaphor.

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the paradoxical simultaneity of presence and absence which writing/memory entails (Birk 2003: 88).²⁷ In considering memory as writing, one must also reflect on Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, according to which fixed or, in a wider sense, archived meaning is constantly deferred because of the spatialisation and temporalisation of the linguistic sign (2005a: 283 – 284). These fundamental aspects which underpin poststructuralist notions of language – i. e. time and space – do not exclusively determine the aforementioned metaphors of memory²⁸ but they nonetheless play an important role in poststructuralist and psychoanalytical appropriations of the archive (see for example Derrida 1995; Van Zyl 2002; Harris 2002). The most important work in this regard is Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), which provides a multi-layered approach to the phenomenon. Firmly embedded within poststructuralist thought (i. e. the idea that subjectivity and our lifeworld are fundamentally determined/constructed by linguistic and symbolical structures; Kristeva 1986a: 90 ff., 120 ff.; Kristeva 1986b: 37; Lacan 1998), Derrida’s Archive Fever emphasises the temporal aspect of the archive together with the related processes of de- and recontextualisation. According to Derrida, thus, the archive is to be conceived as elusive and inherently spectral rather than fixed and static (1995: 53 – 54). By drawing on psychoanalytical approaches, he moreover focuses on the archiving subject itself – a further decisive aspect of his archive concept that is indicated by the original French title’s (le mal d’archive) ambiguity: On the one hand, the title can be read as genitivus obiectivus, i. e. as the feverish desire of the archiving subject to overcome the destructive effects of time and possess the (object in its) origin(ality) (Derrida 1995: 9, 19, 54, 57; Steedman 2001a: 5 – 6; Steedman 2001b: 1159 – 1161). As genitivus subiectivus, on the other hand, le mal d’archive indicates the “sickness” of the archive, i. e. its (self‐)destructiveness that Derrida links to the Freudian death drive and, in a wider sense, to the interplay between Eros and Thanatos (Derrida 1995: 14, 19, 51– 53, 59): “beyond finitude as limit

 See also Harris (2002: 75): “There is no remembering without forgetting. There is no remembering that cannot become forgetting. Forgetting can become a deferred remembering. Forgetting can be a way of remembering. […] The dance of imagination, moving effortlessly through both conscious and unconscious spaces, shapes what is remembered and what is forgotten, and how the trace is configured. Each time the trace is revisited, this dance is busy with its work of shaping and reshaping.”  For the aspect of time within metaphors of memory, see Birk (2003: 89 – 90); Butzer (2005: 12); and Assmann (2006: 165 – 178).

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there is this properly in-finite movement of radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would happen” (Derrida 1995: 59).²⁹ As evidenced by this outline, “the” archive has been approached by a multitude of disciplines (such as linguistics, historiography, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, discourse analysis, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), all of them encompassing far‐reaching ontological, epistemological, psychological and philosophical implications. Altogether, these different theoretical approaches illustrate how the boundaries between the archive’s defining categories – i. e. place and material – are not fixed, but instead rather frequently blurred, oscillating between materiality and immateriality. Furthermore, the common idea that an archive holds the capacity for eternal storage of its objects in their originality is also called into question: it rather proves to be a highly selective, modulating and performative process (Ebeling 2016: 125 – 126) subjected to its own historicity (Ebeling 2016: 129 – 130), mediality (Ebeling 2016: 125 – 129) and (self‐)destructive forces, such as psychological ones (the dialectics of memory and forgetting, the interplay of Eros and Thanatos), linguistic ones (intertextuality; différance) and those forces related to its implicit power structures (e. g. selection; classification; processes of de- and recontextualisation). Not least, the precarious materiality of the archiving medium or institution must also be mentioned in this regard, such as decaying paper, decaying data storage devices or even the threat posed by collapsing buildings (museums, archives etc.). Having scrutinised the concept’s semantic and denotative scope, I can now further elaborate the present study’s thesis by stepping back and taking perspective on different manifestations of the archive during the mid-18th to early 19th century – a period of time that has decidedly shaped today’s world and where many of the above-mentioned features can be located. A brief overview of these phenomena shall provide the cultural-historical and technological/material context for my appropriation of the Derridean concept of le mal d’archive which shall follow in the course of this study. *** In his essay “Of Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault makes an intriguing observation with regard to modernity and the archive: the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project

 See also Kerler (2017: 128 – 131), in which I developed central ideas of this paragraph.

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of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. (1986: 26)

Although Foucault refers here to libraries and museums primarily – both constituting so‐called “heterotopias” and “heterochronies”, concepts which shall be explicated later on – there are, indeed, abundant manifestations of the archive and the attendant archiving processes within the revolutionary modernisation of the 18th/early 19th century and the constitution of modern subjectivity. In fact, the 18th century’s commonly attributed (neoclassicist) notions of order, rationality, logic and causality (see for example Schmidt 1999: 150 – 151, 162) not only turn out to be central concepts that structure and constitute archives but they also go hand in hand with a noticeable fever to archive. The latter should, with a different focus, however, eventually reach a climax by the early-19th century along with an increased awareness of the dynamic character of the archive, namely its paradoxical structure maintained by storage and effacement. As I will argue, (material) archives and archiving practices during the indicated time span emerge as significant objects of investigation inasmuch as they transcend their practical value and reveal the underlying symbolical structures of Romantic culture. In the following overview (and chapters), I will, amongst other things, employ a materialist approach to object culture in order to examine the cultural self‐constitution occurring through archives as well as the material objectification of this constitution in various forms of (the) archive.³⁰ These developments can be found, first and foremost, in 18th century Britain’s increasing expansion of knowledge, its processing and eventually in its professionalisation (see also in a wider context: Siskin 2016). As Richard Drayton argues, knowledge played an essential role in the 18th century for “the unfolding of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in Britain coincided directly with the making of her Empire” (1998: 231). This meant, among other things, that the expansion of knowledge equally required organizing, archiving processes that would be able to bring order to such a substantial degree of informational chaos (such as compilation, description, classification or hierarchization). These processes of ordering would also be extended to Romantic science, which was, as Theresa M. Kelley maintains (2012a: 358 – 359), generally characterised by “the ambition to systematize knowledge” (2012a: 358) and the “desire for systematic certainty” (2012a: 359) though nonetheless recognizing the limits and problems of such a task. To give some examples: First, Britain’s territorial exploration and expansion were documented in the successive creation of maps, constituting

 See Bill Brown (2010: 62, 75) for the critical approach mentioned regarding “object culture”.

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archives of “geographical knowledge” (Drayton 1998: 238) and, in addition to it, discursive‐performative testimonies of the Empire’s power (Drayton 1998: 237– 238). With the American Revolution and the loss of the American colonies, however, these testimonies were called into question and replaced by a profound sense of (imperial) loss (Wright 2012: 260 – 261). Secondly, the formation of an efficient and organised modern state demanded measures of quantification and classification, e. g. a census for proper taxation (Drayton 1998: 245 – 246) or the “[l]and had to be mapped and measured, and its natural resources inventoried, to allow its best defence and explotation” (Drayton 1998: 246). With regard to the latter, it is necessary to mention the numerous enclosure acts throughout the late 18th and early 19th century, which were responsible for segmenting open, communal spaces into individual, private ones.³¹ Thirdly, the urge to accumulate and classify was, moreover, mirrored by personal collections (such as plants, minerals or insects) owned by individuals who, as Drayton (1998: 238 – 239) interestingly notes with special reference to Bishop Henry Compton, delighted in the “possessive satisfaction they gave” (Drayton 1998: 238). A similar instance of such a fever to archive, a “desire for complete systematic knowledge” (Kelley 2012b: 10), is echoed in Alexander von Humboldt’s lifework Kosmos (“I have the mad idea to portray the whole material world, all that we know now of the phenomena of the universe and the Earth, from the nebulae of stars to the geography of mosses on granite rocks, all in one work”; qtd. in Kelley 2012b: 365 – 366; see also in this context Kelley 2012a: 365 – 366) or in Friedrich Schlegel’s “Athenäums‐Fragment 116”, in which he stresses Romantic poetry’s universal and all‐encompassing, unifying character (Schlegel 1980: 204– 205). In this respect, we might also look towards Samuel Johnson’s ambitious Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747) and the actual Dictionary of the English Language (1755). With philological meticulousness, Johnson sets out “to fix the English language” (Johnson 1974: 11), to bring order to linguistic chaos (Johnson 1968: n. p.) and to dig up every word’s etymology to find its origin,³² thereby very much embodying the aforementioned fever to archive. Yet his initial yearning for totality and (etymological) originality is contrasted by a more sober, almost melancholic tone in the preface’s final pages given the impossibility of this

 For an overview, see, for example, Turner (2003: 193 – 194); Mason (2010: 29); or Mingay (1990: 48 – 50).  Johnson (1974: 16): “By tracing in this manner every word to its original, and not admitting, but with great caution, any of which no original can be found, we shall secure our language from being overrun with cant, from being crowded with low terms, the spawn of folly or affectation, which arise from no just principles of speech, and of which, therefore, no legitimate derivation can be shown.”

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Herculean task.³³ On a related note, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s obsession with etymology has to be mentioned, particularly as it constitutes a fundamental element of his thought and work (Jackson 1983). Again, we can discern an archival desire for the absolute origin/the unspoilt original as in Coleridge’s view “[d]iscovering the origin of a word was discovering its uncorrupted meaning” (Jackson 1983: 81) and as “the study of etymologies […] might ultimately be able to trace all phenomena to one, the cause of all” (Jackson 1983: 82). The desire to (re)discover forgotten objects/artefacts and documents, to collect them and to excavate their lost origins, also leads us to the tradition of antiquarianism: Antiquaries were fired by a love of the past. Time and again we find them confessing their love of antiquity, their excitement at the discovery of some ancient manuscript or their delight in deciphering an inscription. They were energetic researchers, travelling the countryside to excavate barrows, draw churches or transcribe manuscripts […] They made copious collections of coins and antiquities […] They wrote to each other endlessly, exchanging information, making extracts describing local antiquities, debating points of etymology or history. (Sweet 2004: XV)

 Johnson (1968: n.p): “To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprize is above the strength that undertakes it: To rest below his own aim is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little. When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.”

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Locating its origins in the 16th century (e. g. William Camden or John Stow), antiquarian research enjoyed its heyday in the 18th century and concluded with the Romantic period (Grimes 2012: 33 – 34; Sweet 2001: 182– 183). The antiquaries’ feverish inclination towards Britain’s (material) past together with their desire to collect not only reflects the “emergence of the ethos of preservationism” (Sweet 2001: 182) but it was also a subject of parody in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816). Scott exposes here, among other things, antiquarianism’s unscientific method by describing Jonathan Oldbuck as good old gentleman [who; D.K.] had, from his antiquarian researches, acquired a delight in building theories out of premises which were often far from affording sufficient ground for them; and being, as the reader must have remarked, sufficiently opinionative, he did not readily brook being corrected, either in matter of fact or judgment, even by those who were principally interested in the subjects on which he speculated. (Scott 1875: 118)

Despite these ironic portrayals and, especially from a contemporary viewpoint, rather dilettante forms of scholarship, antiquarianism played an important role in both literature and the formation of the sciences: for one thing, the first-generation Romantics were to be located within “a new literary culture which was both old and self-consciously fashioned by figures such as [the antiquarians; D.K.] Hone, Douce, Ritson, and Brand” (Butler 1999: 335) surfacing, for example, in a revival of the (medieval) ballad genre, long verse romances, the historical novel or in William Blake’s constructions of Britain’s historical origins/heritage and national myth (Butler 1999: 335; Sweet 2001: 182– 183, 199; Grimes 2012: 36). For another, “nineteenth-century emphasis upon empiricism and documentation arose directly out of antiquarian methods” (Sweet 2004: XVI), such as providing historical meaning for non-literary sources, i. e. artifacts/material objects, through archival methods of identification, classification or comparison (Sweet 2004: XVI; Grimes 2012: 36 – 37). The primarily individual and non-professional works were eventually complemented – if not replaced – by the emerging institutionalisation of the arts and sciences (Drayton 1998: 244),³⁴ which bore the “kernel of a formal empire of professional knowledge” (Drayton 1998: 244) and set the stage for new forms of archive. It is remarkable that many sciences in the Romantic period

 In fact, it was the so-called ‘second Scientific Revolution’ which was particularly “associated with the Romantic period, and signaling the establishment of modern scientific disciplines, greater institutional support for science, and the beginnings of professionalisation” (Jarvis 2004: 100).

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were predominantly characterised by a literal archival fever, manifesting itself in a desire to find (timeless) origin(al)s: German Naturphilosophie (particularly represented by Schelling), which was widely received in Britain, for instance, seeks out universal, metaphysical truths beyond experience; the fascination with the phenomenon of electricity responded to the Romantics’ search for “the internal structure or principle of things that was not accessible to the senses” (Jarvis 2004: 107); and the so‐called ‘transcendental anatomy’ was based on the existence of, and search for, a universal archetype that would find structure among the various species of the natural world.³⁵ An important manifestation of this institutionalisation (as well as a profound fever to physically archive) is the museum, which had its decisively formative phase between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for example the British Museum was founded in 1753, the Louvre in 1793 or the National Portrait Gallery in 1824 (Bennett 2002: 19; Underwood 2012: 238 – 239). Together with libraries, Michel Foucault (1986: 24) subsumes the museum within his concept of the so‐called “heterotopias”, i. e. “counter-sites […] in which the real sites […] which can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1986: 24). This representation of reality – i. e. the museum as a site “of indefinitely accumulating time” (Foucault 1986: 26) – turns out to be a significant example for the concept of archive fever on a collective³⁶ scale: the museum functions as a site in which the figure of ‘Man’ is reassembled from his fragments. If the dispersal of that figure across what now emerges as a series of separate histories means that Man’s unity can no longer be regarded as pre-given, the museum allowed that unity to be reconstituted in the construction of ‘Man’ as a project to be completed through time. (Bennett 2002: 39; see also 45)

The museum not only constitutes (the unrealisable fiction of) a total archive but is most notably an expression of the subject’s (archival) desire for totality and unity. At the same time, however, thinkers such as Quatremère de Quincey or Hegel (and Nietzsche in succession) regarded the museum as the expression of ‘a sense of loss’ (Underwood 2012: 238 – 239), therewith hinting at the archive’s destructive dimension and the lack it represents. Accordingly, De Quincey associates the museum with epitaphs and “mausoleums without graves, […]

 See Jarvis (2004: 99 – 123) for a comprehensive overview of the role of science in the Romantic period.  The museum is closely related to the cultural Zeitgeist insofar as it mirrors, illuminates and (partly) constructs culture and collective identities (Craven 2008: 8 – 12).

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cenotaphs doubly empty” (1821: 56), emphasising how conservation and destruction are closely entangled (1821: 55 – 57). In a different though closely related context, the museum and its exhibited artefacts can be said to belong to the emergence of a material and visual culture (comprising “painting, print culture, book illustrations, visual media and technology, galleries, exhibitions, […] picturesque tourism, and the Grand Tour with its emphasis on viewing and collecting objects abroad”; Thomas 2012: 88), which was very characteristic of the mid‐18th to early 19th century and the related technological developments (Thomas 2012: 87– 97, 101– 102). As Sophie Thomas notes, there was a fundamental change in the mode of these visual appropriations, manifesting itself in an “increasing subjectification of vision” (2012: 89), a shift from mimetic reproduction and display towards imaginative production and a focus on the perceiving subject. Spectacles and forms of “mimic entertainments” (Thomas 2012: 90) played an important role in the cultural industry of the time and for the broader masses – developments the Romantics were both fascinated by and critical of (Thomas 2012: 88 – 90, 101– 102). These developments in visual culture were (implicitly) reflected, for example, in numerous ekphrastic poems (such as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), in depictions of picturesque landscapes (John Clare), or in Lord Byron’s poetic travelogue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage with its (aestheticised) portrayal of the poet’s grand tour and various historic sites and cultural artifacts (e. g. the Colosseum, the Parthenon, the Bridge of Sighs or the statue of the Laocoön and His Sons). Both tendencies of visual display, the mimetic (mass) reproduction of the object and its simulation on the one hand and its subjective appropriation and incorporation on the other, emerge as being closely interrelated: an archival fever for the original, its (material) reconstruction and/or re‐enactment, and finally its total possession due to its (artistic) incorporation. Within the context outlined, the latter comes to represent “a subjective model of vision located more precisely in the body of the observer” (Thomas 2012: 89) or, put differently, a process in which the subject itself becomes the archive. From the mid -18th century on, the museum’s accumulation of the material past was further matched by a large number of increasingly professionalised historiographic studies and archaeological expeditions, which were, on the whole, the products of Europe’s growing fascination with the past, its materiality and artifacts.³⁷ As has been indicated above, antiquarianism played an important part in this development by providing a certain methodology for non-literary

 Fricke (2009: 32, 35, 37). See also Underwood (2012: 229), who scrutinises the proliferation of historical timelines – the so-called Charts – in the mid-18th century.

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sources and by principally constituting “a residual formation, slowly giving way to an emergent form of documented narrative”³⁸. This fascination in the (material) past can be, moreover, traced back to far-reaching modernising processes – historical (most notably the French Revolution), industrial and societal – throughout that time span, resulting in estrangement³⁹ and in an increasing awareness of acceleration⁴⁰ and historical change (Fricke 2009: 32; Fritzsche 2011: 116 – 129). As Robin Jarvis observes, “[t]here was […] a remarkable close link in Romantic-period culture between the experience of being in a state of transition and the development of a sense of history” (2004: 151). In light of this (temporal) fragmentation, the study of the past – or rather the obsession with it – served the purpose of better understanding the present and particularly contributed to the construction of individual and collective identities (Fricke 2009: 32– 33, 42– 43). Again, we should not underestimate the influence of the archival fever of antiquarian studies (most prominently represented by Richard Gough and his circle) in these processes since they provided a strong material and discursive basis for the construction of British nationalistic myths of origins and collective identity⁴¹ – an ideology that is echoed in the Romantic idea “of the nation as an organic whole” (Wright 2012: 265) and its implied longing for totality.⁴² In other words, the creation of archives of the past coincides with a fundamental desire for (collective) identity, unity, closure and the disciplining of an overwhelming lifeworld. Moreover, these archives must also be viewed against the backdrop of an omnipresent awareness of (future) loss since, as Hal Foster (2004) underlines in the example of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, “any  Grimes (2012: 36). See, in this regard, also Butler (1999: 328 – 335); Sweet (2004: XVI); Grimes (2012: 36 – 37).  See, for example, Seeber (1999: 222) or Underwood, who explains the fascination with the past, among other things, as a countermovement against Enlightenment: “Several explanations have been offered for the eighteenth century’s growing interest in historical difference. Perhaps the oldest solution is to characterize the new interest in historical alterity as ‘primitivism’, and to link it with other modes of Romantic feeling that seem to represent a reaction against Enlightenment, or rationality, or civilization” (2012: 231).  For the notion of acceleration as a result of modernising processes in the British context, see Fricke (2009: 11– 14) and for its manifestation in a more general context, see Rosa (2012: 71– 88) and Koselleck (2004: 268 – 270).  See Sweet (2001), in particular 182, 192, 198, for the antiquarians’ role in the construction of myths of history and nation.  “In philosophical terms, both nationalism and imperialism drew on neoclassicism and Enlightenment concepts of culture, particularly in favoring centralized order (and hence bureaucracy), civic duty, and progress, and both drew on Romantic ideas of the nation as an organic whole, both in unifying the population at any one time and in unifying the nation’s history as a natural development from a specific origin” (Wright 2012: 265).

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archive is founded on disaster (or its threat), pledged against a ruin that it cannot forestall” (2004: 5). It is no surprise that Edward Gibbon’s seminal historiographic work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 – 1788) not only constitutes an impressive archive of the time spanning the Roman Empire until the end of Byzantium, thereby accumulating/archiving numerous primary sources, but also notably suggests that Rome be perceived as an image for Britain, which he sees equally marked by (the threat of) loss and decay (Sanders 2000: 334 – 335). In fact, British Romantic historicism favoured the study of national history, which was – tellingly – treated in a nostalgic way, i. e. with a sense of loss (Jarvis 2004: 154). Finally, we could similarly ask whether the idealisation of the Middle Ages and the prevalent trend of the medieval manuscript (e. g. James Macpherson’s Ossian or Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley Poems) correspond to an archival desire within the context of an increasingly accelerated and fragmented lifeworld: that is, the fetishisation of the original document, the construction and archiving of an idealised past, function in this context as supplements⁴³ for the experience of (temporal) loss.⁴⁴ Finally, the listed examples of dictionaries, encyclopaedias and historiographical works should also be reflected upon within the wider context of the period’s rapidly growing print culture. This is supported by an observable and considerable increase in printing and publishing from the late 18th century on (Belanger 1982: 6 – 7; Feather 2006: 98 – 99), giving way to, for example, the phenomenon of “Encyclopedism” (Duff 2015: 189; Haekel 2015), which was both a “publishing phenomenon [and] […] a habit of mind […] a desire for ‘bringing knowledge into encyclopedic forms’” (Duff 2015: 189). The increasing number of magazines and countless periodicals further promoted the (professionalisation of the) sciences by providing a medium for disciplinary discourse and by making the results accessible to a broader (non‐)professional audience (Flieger Samuelian and Schoenfield 2012: 72). In so doing, magazines and periodicals function(ed) as material archives for these scientific advances and discoveries – archives that can never be considered complete due to the fact they are constantly being supplemented and thereby re-contextualised. But what are the reasons that might explain why the mid‐18th to early 19th century came to be thought

 In the course of this study, the word “supplement” will be used in the Derridean sense (Derrida 2016: 156 – 157), i. e. in its paradoxical simultaneity of ‘adding s.th.’ and ‘replacing s.th.’.  See, in this regard, also Jarvis (2004: 171): “Embracing medieval culture out of a desire ‘to feel at home in an ordered yet organically vital universe’ was the essence of Romantic reaction; in deploying a seductive interpretation of historically remote people and places in order to express an attitude towards change in the present it was characteristic of Romantic uses of the past in general.”

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of as the “new age of paper” (Stauffer 2006: para. 8)? The decisive factors can surely be attributed to technological and social changes: for one thing, the “’diffusion of knowledge’ […] was one of the ideals of the age” (Feather 2006: 107) and largely coincided with a doubling of the population and increasing urbanisation over the course of the 18th century. Not only were new, vast and more competitive markets created (e. g. provincial markets, Irish and Scottish book trades, schools, textbook industry or retail booksellers), but there was an also an emergence of a new and substantial (social) readership – especially in light of the French Revolution and the emergence of a new urban working class – who could now read print media, i. e. books, magazines and newspapers (Belanger 1982: 18 – 19; Feather 2006: 85 – 86, 97– 99). In addition, by the end of the 18th century the abolishment of shared copyright and the introduction of limited copyright rendered writing a much more profitable profession for authors (though novels sold much better than poetry, with the famous exception of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) (Belanger 1982: 20 – 23; Feather 2006: 129 – 130). The development of Britain “into a print-dependent society” (Feather 2006: 85) with a massive demand for print media was, for another thing, both accompanied and fostered by technological evolution. Innovations such as the Fourdrinier machines (1807), steam printing (notably the steam powered cylinder press constructed by the German Friedrich König in 1811), lithography (1801), the mechanisation of bookbinding and the construction of railways (1830) paved the way for efficient mass production and distribution of print media, with several of these innovations not taking full effect until the end of the 19th century (Feather 2006: 86 – 96). The proliferation of these archives and archival practices both affected the Romantics and were (implicitly) reflected by them in multiple ways. A very pragmatic aspect of such change, for example, was how this proliferation provided a better way for earning money, fixing (archiving) and distributing their work. The far-reaching range of distribution together with broader audiences were of particular significance in the creation of a new “aesthetics of celebrity” (Flieger Samuelian and Schoenfield: 2012: 71), especially in the case of periodical culture (Flieger Samuelian and Schoenfield: 2012: 70 – 74). As Michael Gamer shows in his recent study Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (2017), poetry at the time was indeed a business inasmuch as the Romantic writers had to operate not only with the confines of (abstract) aesthetic registers, but also with strict adherence to the (economic) demands of the literary marketplace as well as archival processes of (re‐)production, (self‐)commodification and canonisation. For many authors (in particular Lord Byron, as I will argue using the examples of “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), these requirements led to the creation of a public, material archive of the self – an archive

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and place of self-definition where they could both inscribe, as well as modify (to a certain extent), their personas. Finally, the precarious materiality of this thriving archive also constitutes an (implicit) theme and meta‐discourse in many Romantic works. As Andrew Stauffer argues, “[f]or the Romantics, the burgeoning culture of print led to two related archival troubles: the fragility of the material and the vast quantities of it” (2006: para 14). While the sheer quantity of circulating paper can be seen as an excessive supplementation of the archive, threatening archival practices rather than supporting them,⁴⁵ the fears regarding the archive’s materiality actually echo the socio-economic and technological conditions of the time. In fact, there was a considerable discrepancy between the fact that although the technological evolution had resulted in an increasing quantity of paper, at the same time there had been a marked decrease in the quality of printing and written paper over the course of the late 18th until the end of the 19th century (Feather 2006: 87). These anxieties become manifest, for example, in the repeated use of the motif of “scattered leaves” in Shelley’s and Keats’s works,⁴⁶ in the image of Lucy’s fleeting (foot)prints in the snow (William Wordsworth, “Lucy Gray”) or, as I will show later, in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, whose material archives (i. e. written language and the sonnet form) decay to the same extent as that of the statue of Ozymandias. Up to this point, much has been said about the material manifestations of (the) archive(s) and material archiving practices. These reflections will now be complemented with a brief outline of the major philosophical and psychological discourses of the time. Fundamentally based on empiricism, 18th century epistemology features various affinities with the notion of the archive and the associated archival processes. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739 – 1740), David Hume offers a basic distinction between sensory, emotional impressions and abstracted ideas which refer to the former on a higher level (Hume 1962: 113 – 116): Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning (Hume 1962: 311)

 “Britons in the Romantic era were troubled by an imagined waste land of forgotten, ruined texts. […] the individual writer’s papers were feared to be lost in the general welter of material, increasingly imagined as uncertain, unmanageable, and entropic” (Stauffer 2006: para. 3).  See Stauffer (2006) for the notion of archive fever and “the trope of scattered leaves as an index of Romantic concerns about the fates of works on paper in the age of industrial papermaking” (Stauffer 2006: abstract) in the works of Shelley and Keats.

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The frequent use of the word impression in this context turns out to be highly significant as it figuratively alludes to the physical act of imprinting/inscribing. On the one hand, Hume clearly makes reference to his predecessor John Locke, who, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, rejects the concept of “innate ideas” (Locke 1975: 55) instead proposing the idea that the human mind is initially an “empty Cabinet” (Locke 1975: 55), a tabula rasa on which experience leaves its mark: “Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? […] To this I answer, in one word, From Experience” (Locke 1975: 104). On the other hand, with reference to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, it can be argued that the notion of ideas as abstracted representations of impressions constitutes an archival process: “it [the word impression; D.K.] reawakens the code of English empiricism: the concepts of sensible ‘impression’ and of copy play a major role there in the genealogy of ideas; and is not the copy of an impression already a sort of archive?” (Derrida 1995: 23). Furthermore, Derrida suggests that the word impression also alludes to a pivotal act in the archiving process, i. e. “the moment proper to the archive, […] the instant of archivization” (Derrida 1995: 22), as it describes the very moment of the substrate’s inscription (Derrida 1995: 22– 23). With that said, it becomes clear that 18th century epistemology and notions related to the archive are not only closely connected to the concept of writing (or language in general) but fundamentally based on it as it constitutes their medium par excellence. ⁴⁷ Once these impressions/ideas are – to use John Locke’s words – “imprinted” or “stored” (Locke 1975: 106) in the human mind, we can observe further characteristics of the archiving process described earlier, namely its active and modulating power.⁴⁸ As David Hume outlines (1962: 319 – 321) with regard to the “Connexion or Association of Ideas” (1962: 319), various (simple) ideas are synthesised into more complex ones through the uniting principles of “RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT” (1962: 319). This can be paralleled with the so‐called “nomological principle” (Derrida 1995: 9), according to which the archive (in this case, the

 See Keach (2010: 104– 112) for a re‐evaluation of John Locke’s epistemology with regard to linguistic theory. For a more general, poststructuralist discussion of the interrelation between the archive and language, see Prescott (2008) and Nesmith (2002: 29).  See, in this regard, also Abrams (1953: 57– 69), who points out that the “change from imitation to expression” (1953: 57), from passiveness to activeness, also played an important role in 18th / 19th century epistemology. It was further mirrored by the Romantic poets, first and foremost William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who conceived of the workings of the human mind as “creative perception” (1953: 63).

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human mind) grafts its structures upon the objects archived (i. e. impressions and ideas).⁴⁹ These primarily philosophical approaches to the workings of the human mind were complemented by various psychological discourses. In addition to the strong connection between memory (metaphors) and notions of the archive that were previously mentioned, there are two examples from a broader European context that turn out to be of particular interest: First, the disease of nostalgia that manifested during the 18th to early 19th century, which was also widely occurring in Britain at that time.⁵⁰ Nostalgia’s peculiar structure may be best explained with the help of Michael S. Roth’s analysis of various medical discourses in France. Accordingly, nostalgia was regarded as a pathological “excess of desire for the past” (Roth 2011c: 26), mainly resulting from the increase in processes of modernisation and the population’s migration⁵¹ from rural or mountainous regions. The cure was to be found in a return to the place of the past or respective memory, though “[t]rue nostalgics” (Roth 2011c: 30) did not want any remedy but instead took pleasure in their yearning for the past (Roth 2011c: 23 – 38). Temporal experience is thus translated into spatio-mnemonic experience, i. e. places function as archives where memory is stored. At the same time, however, the nostalgic’s masochistic suffering derives from a double movement inherent to the archive, which ultimately allows him “to preserve the longing” (Roth 2011c: 30): On the one hand, he suffers from a fever to timelessly conserve the former impressions beyond the contaminating effects of time. On the other hand, the nostalgic knows that this archive is merely a deferred simulacrum since the repetition of the object desired – i. e. its processing and recontextualisation in memory – can never be one with the original (Roth 2011c: 30 – 31). Secondly, this pivotal dialectic of the (psychic) archive – i.e. the concurrence of storage and destruction as well as memory and forgetting – was also regarded as central to the constitution of the subject’s identity. The 18th century is, as Fritz Breithaupt elaborates with regard to the English, German and French contexts, characterised by “its obsession with technologies of reversal” (2005: 81), especially in the field of psychology. By the end of the 18th century, the latter started

 For the “nomological principle”, see Derrida (1995: 9 – 10, 17).  See Goodman (2008: 199 – 204) for the phenomenon of medical nostalgia with special regard to the British context.  As Goodman shows with particular focus on the British context, nostalgia was regarded as a “pathology of travel, a result of the compulsory motion of bodies, not just within them” (2008: 201). These motions involved, most significantly, “geographical movements as well as their shifting political and economic determinants of war, depopulation, emigration, resettlement” (Goodman, 2008: 201).

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to reformulate the role of memory insofar as it closely related the act of recollecting with the constitution of the self. However, the mnemonic repetition – or, to be more precise, reenactment – of the past was put into a spatio-temporal context, thus making each repetition a repetition with difference (2005: 81– 82, 86, 91– 92):⁵² the psychological needs an act that, while recalling and repeating the past as it was, reenacts it, gives it space and time, and thus repeats it as something different. As Derrida would say, the psychological requires an archive. (Breithaupt 2005: 82)

Following this observation, we can further say that the self-construction of identity via memory is essentially an archival act in which the respective remembrance(s) bear(s) traces of its/their own effacement, hence following the dialectics of storage and destruction that are demonstrable in the Derridean concept of the archive. This is, following Christoph Bode, similarly echoed in British Romanticism’s strong awareness that the (self‐)constitution of subjective identity is not fixed and static but rather an interminable discursive process in which the self is both present and absent (2008: 7, 40). Romanticism’s strong emphasis on subjectivity, thus, goes hand in hand with a profound psychologisation⁵³ of the lyrical I, which is deeply indebted to the notion of archive fever: Topics that focus on the important formative influence of first impressions during childhood, the mourning of its loss as well as attempts at its reconstruction (see e. g. Wordsworth’s “Nutting”, “There was a Boy” or The Prelude) all centre on the idea of the subject becoming an archive (of its past) in the face of loss. *** Although the mid-18th to early 19th century represents a long and heterogeneous period of time,⁵⁴ it is opinio communis that this time span is particularly characterised by an increased awareness of acceleration, temporalisation, spatialisation, alienation and, not least, fragmentation due to various modernising processes.⁵⁵ Yet, little to no attention has been paid to scrutinize the ensuing effects  See also Breithaupt (2005: 93): “The self as such is the product of the operation of the psychological, the correction of memory, the archival act.”  See, for example, Faflak‘s study (2008) on the proto-Freudian character of Romantic poetry.  See, for example, Marshall Brown (2010: 34– 55) for the heterogeneous tendencies of Romanticism and the Enlightenment and the blurred boundaries between those two epochs. See, in this regard, also Jarvis (2004: 149 – 150) and Reinfandt (2008: 66 – 70).  See, for example, Seeber (1999: 217 ff.); Fricke (2009: 11– 14); Rosa (2012: 71– 88); Rosa (2013: 187).

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from the perspective of the notion of archive fever. As has been shown, however, the latter – i. e. the fever to archive, archives and acts of archiving in different manifestations, the opposed structure of storage and effacement – and its various discursive appropriations, becomes a substantial determinant of mid‐18th to early 19th century culture. With reference to the ideas set out in the preceding paragraphs, the following main tendencies can be provisionally abstracted before they are situated within wider philosophical, psychological and aesthetic contexts in the next chapters: (1) the numerous modernising processes in different areas together with the related proliferation of the sciences demanded new methods of processing that would be able to bring order to the chaos of an increasingly accelerated, fragmented and overwhelming lifeworld. At their root, such methods can be deemed as archiving processes, resulting in the creation of multifarious archives which, in turn, take on the form of material objectifications of the paradigmatic shifts and technological developments mentioned. The increasing emergence of the (notion of the) archive was furthermore reflected in various (indirect) discursive appropriations, such as in the fields of philosophy and psychology. Given these abundant archives and archival practices we can, nevertheless, discern an increased sense of loss (2). The latter can be traced back to the aforementioned modernising processes, first and foremost in the cases of the Enclosure Acts, the Industrial Revolution and the associated proliferation of the sciences. These modernizing processes posed a threat to (or even corrupted) Romantic notions of primitiveness and naturalness due to their civilisational and mechanic artificiality, also bringing several (self‐)destructive tendencies to the surface. To take some examples: The mapping and enclosing of land – in a broader sense, acts of “unification, of identification, of classification” (Derrida 1995: 10), which Derrida considers as crucial to the archive (1995: 10) – in conjunction with the effects wrought by urbanisation also meant a literal loss of spaces for many people. Moreover, the construction of manifold (new) archives throughout the course of the age of knowledge also resulted in a “swelling” of these repositories so that scores of archived material soon began to indicate a sense of lack rather than an aggregate (see, for instance, the examples provided in the case of the museum as well as the almost entropic increase of written paper within the context of print culture). Especially with regard to print culture, thus, it is important to bear in mind how “the process of collection itself depends on prior events of dispersion and scattering, a […] parallel to the ways in which […] the archive simultaneously saves and hides” (Kelley and Lynch 2018: 5). It is telling that in 1778, even Linnaeus had to concede that “the task of codifying and naming all species and ordering them into indisputable categories and relationships could never be complete” (Kelley 2004: 310). A reading of Derrida allows us to consider how these

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examples correspond to a feverish desire to constantly supplement the archive – a process that is potentially unlimited⁵⁶, and whose action may actually pose a threat to the initial archival intention. These developments were eventually accompanied by the sobering aftermath of the French Revolution, resulting in a sense of disillusionment regarding the betrayal of its ideals, surfacing with the loss of the long‐awaited paradise to come (Abrams 1963: 28 – 29, 37).⁵⁷ Moreover, beyond such an abstract sense of (ideal) loss, the French Revolution became a reminder of the power structures that underlie archival processes due to the fact that it is the prevailing regime, acting as archon and exerting its authority over (state) archive(s), which decides the documents that will be kept and archived, and those that will be discarded or even destroyed, such has been the case with anti-government pamphlets or problematic documents in the course of changing regimes, war, revolutions, or political and colonial developments (Kelley 2018: 145 – 146).⁵⁸ The general sense of loss that has been alluded to not only suggests the (self‐)destructive dimension of many archives and archival practices, but also produces a yearning for originality, totality and unity, further inducing the fever to create new archives and to gather more material in order to compensate for this lack (3). Irrespective of their different manifestations (material and immaterial), these archives often possess common paradoxical qualities (4): the oppositional structures of storage and effacement, as well as presence and absence, emerge in considerably multifarious forms, and can be related to Derrida’s concept of the archive’s “sickness”, i. e. its spectrality. In the following section, these preliminary observations and the iridescent concept of the archive shall be concretised and operationalised with respect to the subsequent literary analyses. For this purpose, I will relate these findings to discourses on melancholia and the notion of archive fever in the chapters which follow. My thesis is that the (psychological) effects of the outlined modernisation processes (technological, socio-historical, political, philosophical, ideological, media etc.), and especially their aesthetic adaptations/reflection, manifest themselves in a Zeitgeist that can be thoroughly understood with my interpretation of the concept of le mal d’archive. The latter should be regarded

 Derrida (1995: 45): “The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.”  “The great Romantic poems were written not in the mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the later mood of revolutionary disillusionment or despair” (Abrams 1963: 53). See also, Fritzsche (2011: 116 – 129).  For the simultaneity of destruction and preservation with regard to the French Revolution and archival practices, see also Assmann (2018: 181– 183).

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as a superordinated principle that not only embraces the indicated phenomena but also determines the entire epoch and its ensuing influence on subjectivity and aesthetics; a spirit of the age that culminated in the Romantic movement.

2 Loss, Melancholia, the Archive and Spectrality This chapter seeks to explore the basic interrelations between the phenomenon of melancholia, the archive and their (self‐)destructive tendencies against the backdrop of the Romantic period and the notion of “archive fever”. The results will constitute a starting point for further elaboration on specific archives/archival practices in Romantic poetry in the subsequent chapter (ch. II. 3.). It will be argued that the poets’ archive fever manifests itself, firstly, in a sense of loss that frequently (but not exclusively) surfaces in symptoms of melancholy. At the same time, the poets enact an attempt at overcoming (or, at times, actually prolonging) this loss (and/or melancholy) by archiving the lost object(s). However, these archives (e. g. places, memory, the lyrical I’s psychology/subjectivity and eventually the poem itself, including its materiality and mediality) are haunted by a spectral double movement towards storage and displacement, and therein towards presence and absence. These three consecutive, yet closely interrelated, basal phases shall be further explicated and problematised with the help of an extended appropriation of Derrida’s Archive Fever, complemented by psychoanalytic theories, (post‐)structuralism and cultural/material studies. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Jacques Derrida bases the origin of the feverish desire to archive on the threat of a “radical finitude” (1995: 19) which he loosely relates to the Freudian concept of the death drive (Derrida 1995: 18 – 19, 59): There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive. (Derrida 1995: 19)

As we will see later, Derrida refers to the death drive in various contexts involving different manifestations and functions. Here, however, it figures the (destructive/entropic) notion of temporality in a fundamental existential sense: the threat of a “radical finitude” is essentially inscribed in one’s own life, undermining the very opposition of life and death (drives), that is, “death as an eternal

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necessity of life” (Derrida 1987: 363)⁵⁹ inasmuch as the self comes into being through this destructive movement; or to put it shortly in Martin Heidegger’s words, existence is a being-toward-death. ⁶⁰ The experience and anxiety of (future) loss – such as the subject’s awareness of its own inevitable death and loss of time or, in a more concrete sense, the loss of actual (external) objects – is thus closely related to the fever to archive. This “sickness” of the archiving subject, in turn, may frequently correlate with the phenomenon of melancholy,⁶¹ which likewise “emanates from (or, in some cases, is accompanied by) a sense of loss” (Middeke and Wald 2011: 3) and is also closely related to the subject’s awareness of (destructive) temporality and finitude (Middeke and Wald 2011: 3 – 4). Both the archival fever and melancholia, hence, have their most basic roots in the experience and/or anxiety of finitude and temporality. The subject’s archival fever, i. e. its feverish/compulsive acts of archiving trough which it believes to timelessly possess the/an object (Derrida 1995: 9, 19, 54, 57; Steedman 2001a: 5 – 6; Steedman 2001b: 1159 – 1161), can thus be also identified as a manifestation of the melancholic’s narcissistic introjection of the lost object (Freud 1982: 202– 205; Kristeva 1989: 40 – 47, 60 – 61).⁶² Though a general (melancholic) sense of loss might be an anthropological constant, the mid‐18th to early 19th century turns out to be of particular interest in this respect.⁶³ For, as has been shown in chapter II.1, it is precisely this time span which is characterised by decisive historical factors that entail a rapidly emerging consciousness of (temporal) loss, surfacing in various cultural permutations and discursive manifestations of the notion of archive fever. Above all, it is within the literature of that time that an aesthetic sensitivity emerges that gives voice to these processes, reflects them and tries to find (imaginative) answers. Beginning with the graveyard poets, who took up baroque themes such as meditations on loss, death and finitude, this sensitivity eventually assumed a

 See also Derrida (1987: 359): “Before all else one must auto-affect oneself with one’s proper death (and the self does not exist before all else, before this movement of auto-affection), make certain that death is the auto-affection of life or life the auto-affection of death.”  See Derrida (1987: 359 – 363) for the similarities between Freud’s death drive and Heidegger’s philosophy.  For the interrelation between Derrida’s concept of archive fever and melancholia (mainly drawing on Sigmund Freud, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler, and with special regard to the contemporary novel), see also Boulter (2011: in particular 1– 15).  See also Kerler (2017: 128 – 129), in which I developed the central ideas of this paragraph.  See also Kelley (2018: 143 – 145), who provides the diagnosis that “[l]osing things is a repeating fear among the early Romantics” (2018: 144).

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decisive form in Romantic literature,⁶⁴ which was particularly characterised by a “melancholy consciousness of temporality” (Middeke and Wald 2001: 5). The Romantics’ melancholic nostalgia for the (idealised) past (Goodman 2008: 195 – 196), their depictions of nature as sublime place of memory or attempts at timelessly conserving the past in art (e. g. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) are further expressions of an archival desire in view of an anxious awareness surrounding temporality and finitude. A further remarkable aspect in this regard, as Sigrun Anselm shows in a wider context, is that the Enlightenment brought about a loss of the mythological sense of / relation to the origin, which was overall experienced as a fall into a nothingness and resulted in a yearning for the (notion of an) origin (Anselm: 1990: 15 – 29; see also in this regard Goodmann 2008: 195). These two fundamental aspects of Romanticism – i. e. the melancholy awareness of (the threat of) temporality and the loss of the/an origin – prove to be two sides of the same coin, namely archive fever. Not only is the archival desire kindled by (the anxiety of) “radical finitude” (Derrida 1995: 19, see also 59) but it also presents itself in the “painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin” (Derrida: 1995: 54, see also 57). From a psychoanalytical point of view, this can – in its extreme form – constitute a narcissistic fixation on the lost object, excluding a successful sublimation and resulting in symptoms of melancholy. Hence, a melancholic mood frequently accompanies this abstract and generalised Romantic sense of loss. The latter may take on several different forms, for example real (loved) persons/objects or, conversely, more abstract losses, such as the subject’s increased awareness of its own finitude (memento mori) or the alienating effects of modernisation. Furthermore, the awareness of a general metaphysical crisis played an important role at that time.⁶⁵ In the field of religion, the 18th century was basically dominated by deism (Benziger 1962: 13 – 15) so that for “many of the components of traditional religion which had appealed to feeling and imagination, the imagery of the New Testament story and the parables, began to be replaced by mental abstraction” (Benziger 1962: 13). As a result, the cold rationality of abstract principles and the physical sciences became the “ultimate model” (Benziger 1962: 13), substituting the “feeling for the supernatural or numinous” (Benziger 1962: 15), which the Romantics would later try to recover (Benziger 1962: 13 – 17; Reardon 1985: vii–viii; Jarvis 2004: 120 – 130). As Sigrun Anselm lucidly  See Middeke and Wald (2011: 4– 5) for Romanticism’s particular relationship with temporality and melancholia.  Benziger (1962: 10, 17) and Jarvis (2004: 124): “The identities, beliefs, and aspirations of Romantic-period writers were formed during an age in which the religious, spiritual, and moral state of the nation was permanently in question.” See also Priestman (2006).

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argues in a more general context, the Enlightenment, and its related processes of secularisation, led to a decline in the traditional powers of feudalism, church⁶⁶ and monarchy. In light of the Enlightenment’s emancipation of the human spirit, the grand récit of religion (which itself replaced archaic myths of origin) had increasingly lost its soothing function: it could no longer successfully sublimate the original split between mother and child – indirectly reflected by Christian eschatological notions of (man’s expulsion from) paradise and its restitution – and was subsequently replaced by a ubiquitous yearning for the notion of an (absolute) origin (Ursprungssehnsucht) (Anselm: 15 – 29). On a related note, Hildegard von Bingen had earlier traced the origins of melancholia back to the loss of paradise, i. e. by eating the forbidden apple, Adam had also incorporated the black bile (2011: 62). Though this loss might have been (partly) sublimated by Christian notions of the Everafter, the outlined metaphysical crisis rather intensified this spiritual sense of loss. Such a sense of longing was, for example, already a theme in graveyard poetry which projected the experience of personal loss onto the promise of the Everafter (e. g. Thomas Parnell, Edward Young or Thomas Gray). The respective poems thus not only commemorate the departed but are themselves archives of the lost origin’s comforting myth, namely the metanarrative of Christianity. Romanticism, in turn, was characterised by both the recovery of “some of the qualities of traditional Christianity” (Benziger 1962: 14) and its modification⁶⁷, most notably embodied in its increasing orientation towards pantheism (Reardon 1985: vii–viii, 5, 26 – 27; Benziger 1962: 5, 14– 15): in the course of their “subjectivization of all religious truths” (Reardon 1985: 10), the Romantics interpreted the universe “not only in terms of pantheism and nature-mysticism, but in those often enough of the received Christian teaching, Catholic or Protestant.”⁶⁸ Running counter to the epoch’s modernising processes, the Romantics thus venerated nature due to the uncorrupted naturalness and sublime qualities it was deemed to possess, which they thought to be a manifestation of the divine. This idealised view of nature can be either identified with the notion  With regard to the English context, see also Jarvis (2004: 126): “the main problems faced by the state Church in the period were mass abstention from worship, and the weaknesses of its parochial structure in the context of seismic demographic change. Essentially, the Church was losing ground because it was too slow to adapt to the pace and pattern of urbanization and too slow to respond to the challenge of a new industrial working class.”  See also Benziger (1962: 17): “the Romantics, for whom another century of critical thought and the French Revolution had shattered the traditional worlds of belief and imagination, felt compelled to a great effort to re-create new structures almost from the ground up.”  Reardon (1985: 26 – 27). In fact, these Christian teachings were quite numerous, encompassing the various branches of Anglicanism, Nonconformity and Dissent (Moore and Strachan 2010: 92– 93 and Jarvis 2004: 124– 130).

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of a prelapsarian paradise (and a manifestation of God himself) or, seen from a psychoanalytical perspective, with the pre‐oedipal mother‐child‐dyad that Julia Kristeva denominates chora. ⁶⁹ In either case, they are expressions of a deep-rooted yearning for the singularity of a monistic order, an organic unity.⁷⁰ The (melancholic) sense of loss outlined not only unleashes a fever to archive but it most notably results in the creation of manifold archives that try to supplement/compensate for this lack. Literature plays a major role in reflecting and articulating these (partly unconscious) processes, thereby constructing its own archives. At this point one may be tempted to say with Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia that this is a work of mourning inasmuch as the loss/lost object is sublimated via its symbolic replacement during the act of archiving (Freud 1982: 202– 203; Žižek 2000: 658, 662) – an issue that shall be problematised later on. However, prior to this we need to determine how these archives come into view. As Derrida notes, an archive would not be possible “without foundation, without substrate, without substance, without subjectile” (1995: 22). With regard to Romantic literature, the following places “of consignation, of ‘inscription’ or of ‘recording’” (Derrida 1995: 22– 23) are conceivable, each of them being a further abstraction of the previous one: firstly, drawing on the archive’s spatio-mnemonic characteristics outlined in chapter II.1, archived spaces and spaces as archives/ places of memory. That is, the spaces depicted in the respective poems and their semantic potential shall be analysed from the perspective of the notion of archive fever, questioning the extent to which imagined or reconstructed spaces are manifestations of an archival fever, i.e. an expression of the subject’s awareness/ melancholy of (temporal) loss and the subsequent desire to timelessly archive the object(s) desired. What kind of spaces/places are archived in the respective poems and in what way is memory/loss stored in these literary spaces? With that said, secondly, it should be noted that the spaces depicted cannot be separated completely from the poet’s (and, by extension, the lyrical I’s) psychology. In fact, they are the latter’s (un)conscious projections. This applies in particular to the Romantic poets with their emphasis on subjectivity, striving to transcend the (outer) natural world by illuminating it sympathetically⁷¹ via their own (inner) imagination. In this respect – and from a Kantian perspective – the subject’s consciousness and the natural world are closely interrelated, if not supplementing each other (Abrams 1953: 22, 51– 53, 58– 59; see also Hanke 1981: 117– 118). Nevertheless,  For the concept of chora, see Kristeva (1986a: 90 ff., 120 ff.).  For the concept of organic unity in this context, see Benziger (1951: 24– 48) and Remak (1968: 44– 46).  For the distinction between “empathy” and “sympathy” in the context of Romantic imagination, see Bate (1945: 144– 164).

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I suggest “the subject as archive”⁷² as a second category in order to give more prominent focus to the psychology of the lyrical I. This will prove advantageous for the subsequent analyses where the poems’ semantics of space will be able to be differentiated (to a certain extent) from the latter, even though their interrelation must be taken into account. Thirdly, a further abstraction of the previous categories will involve a configuration of the poem functioning as archive, considering the manner in which the latter ultimately frames or “houses”⁷³ the (lost) object desired. Following Derrida’s general observation that the archive significantly determines its objects (1995: 9–10, 18), it can be concluded that the poem as archive equally grafts its logic and structures – such as the conventions of art, genre, (Romantic) aesthetics and ultimately language itself – together with its materiality and mediality on the respective object(s). The three basic manifestations of archives that I have specified will constitute the basis of the analyses which follow, and will be further differentiated and problematised in the course of the study. *** Thus far, le mal d’archive has been predominantly treated as genitivus obiectivus, that is, as (melancholic) sense of loss and an ensuing desire to archive. Now, a closer look at the concept’s second meaning is needed, i. e. the archive’s “sickness”, which figuratively refers to the destructive forces working from within and against it. Derrida assigns a central role to the latter for “[t]he archive always works, and a priori, against itself” (1995: 14) and is thus marked by its spectrality: “the structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori, neither present nor absent ‘in the flesh,’ neither visible nor invisible” (1995: 54). With the concept, or rather the notion, of “spectrality”, Derrida draws on his work Specters of Marx (1993), according to which the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter. […] One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non‐present present, this being‐there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. (Derrida 2006: 5)

 See Boulter (2011: 3 – 6) for the idea of the “subject as archive” with special regard to the contemporary novel.  See Derrida’s note (1995: 9) that the word archive derives from the Greek word arkheion.

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Applied to le mal d’archive we can say that the archive is characterised by a paradoxical structure of simultaneous storage and effacement, of presence and absence, which threatens the very material it actually tries to preserve. As a result, the lost object (i. e. the “spirit”) returns in the materiality of the archive (i. e. the “flesh”), however, only in a spectral form, i. e. as simultaneous presence and absence. This threat, or rather ontological a priori, of destruction and loss, in turn, further kindles the archival desire (i. e. the lost, spectral object not only haunts its archive but also the archiving subject) and closes the circle with the (melancholic) sense of loss described earlier (Derrida 1995: 14, 53 – 54, 56 – 59; Derrida 2006: 5 – 6, 9 – 10).⁷⁴ But what is this destructive movement precisely and how does it become apparent? Derrida loosely relates these dialectics to the Freudian notion of the death drive (1995: 13 – 14), the interplay of Eros and Thanatos as described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, also naming it “anarchivic” (1995: 14), “anarchy drive” (1995: 14) and “the specter of oedipal violence which inscribes the superrepression in the archontic institution of the archive” (1995: 52). The fact that Derrida relates his appropriation of the death drive, in accordance with Freud, to the “logic of repetition” (Derrida 1995: 14) abets a more thorough understanding of the archive’s destructive dimensions. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 2003: 76–79, 95–97), Sigmund Freud introduces the concept of the death drive which he characterises by its conservative, regressive nature. It strives to “restore a prior state” (Freud 2003: 76) and “to return to the inanimate” (Freud 2003: 78), thus generally trying to “reduce inner stimulative tension […], to resolve it completely” (Freud 2003: 95). In other words, the death drive refers to a movement of disintegration, a moment of maximum entropy (Däuker 2002: 159). As such, however, the death drive is silent (Däuker 2002: 167–168) and the same applies to Derrida’s anarchy drive (of the archive) which equally “eludes perception” (Derrida 1995: 14). The latter can be further specified by drawing on Udo Hock’s lucid re‐evaluation of Freud’s drive dualism as a drive monism,⁷⁵ i.e. the death drive has to be derived from Eros: neither being able to be represented in the symbolic nor the imaginary, the death drive can only emerge as a surplus, a residue of Eros. This excess, in turn, can present itself in the destruction drive (a narcissistic surplus turned outwards), masochism (sexually overcharged selfdestructiveness) and finally in the boundlessness of the repetition compulsion (Hock 2000: 211–212, 216–218; see also in this context Däuker 2002: 167–168).  See also Boulter (2011: 7): “The archive thus is doubly inflected by loss: it is a response to loss–we build memorials to loss, to trauma; the subject remembers and, melancholically, becomes that loss– and it anticipates, perhaps creates, the conditions of future loss”.  See also Derrida (1987: 366 – 368).

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Likewise, Derrida indicates that the anarchy/death drive working within the archive can only be grasped in its disguise, i.e. when it surfaces as “erotic simulacrum, […] masks of seduction: lovely impressions” (Derrida 1995: 14). In short, it emerges within the (aesthetic) nexus between the elusive essence/origin of the beautiful and the notion of (its) destruction/death: “These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death” (Derrida 1995: 14) – a paradoxical simultaneity that, as I shall argue further below, can be linked to the concept of the sublime, understood as an excess of the beautiful. Departing from these observations, the following basic manifestations of the death/anarchy drive can be derived. First, the death drive’s regressive tendency towards the inanimate (Freud 2003: 78) finds its expression in archive fever’s “painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin” (Derrida 1995: 54, see also 57). As Cathy Caruth points out in her reading of Freud, the very moment of “’awakening’ to life” (1996: 65) (an awakening that Freud tellingly describes as fright) is a fundamental traumatic experience that strongly impacts the subject’s life: “Life itself […] is an awakening out of ‘death’” (1996:65); “the experience of having passed beyond death without knowing it” (1996: 65) constitutes the genesis of the death drive, manifesting itself in a repetition compulsion (in various forms and intensities) that, as I suggest following from Caruth, strives to unconsciously grasp this survival by trying to return to the most pre‐traumatic state of life: the inanimate, death (Caruth 1996: 63–65; Stumm and Pritz 2009: 705). That is, compulsive repetition is at root a form of stasis and therefore serves to reduce the “inner stimulative tension” (Freud 2003: 95) – a process that ultimately describes a movement towards the inanimate/absolute origin. Archive fever’s obsession with origins/the original can – in certain contexts – thus similarly emerge as a manifestation of the death drive, becoming aesthetically apparent in modes of repetition and/or imaginative reconstructions of the (absolute) origin. The latter can be loosely related to Sigrun Anselm’s concept of Ursprungssehnsucht (1990: 15–29), i. e. as a manifestation of the longing for the absolute origin, which can be identified by the aforementioned desire to return to the pre-oedipal mother-child-dyad (or even to a phase before⁷⁶), (religious notions of) paradise or idealised/sublime nature (Frye 1983: 17–18, 37– 38; see also Trott [1998: 84–85] for the religious substrate in Romantic notions of the sublime).

 According to Sigmund Freud, the death drive manifests itself psychologically in an unconscious desire to return to the mother’s womb (Stumm and Pritz 2009: 705).

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Second, the death drive being a phenomenon of surplus of Eros, as manifested in melancholy.⁷⁷ Following Udo Hock, the melancholic’s inability to detach from the lost object, i.e. their excessive attachment to it, results in a surplus of binding energy. This surplus/attachment, in turn, frequently manifests itself in various forms of repetition, which altogether indicate stasis and disintegration, making melancholia fundamentally governed by the death drive (Hock 2000: 216–221, 302–303). Against this backdrop, “suffering” from archive fever – i.e. having a compulsion to archive – overlaps with the melancholic’s excessive, narcissistic attachment to the lost object. In other words, it is precisely the act of feverish archiving that creates the said surplus of binding energy which unveils the – albeit spectral – presence of the death drive, thus ultimately constituting the paradoxical structure of the archive. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s (2000: 660) thoughts on the phenomenon of melancholy, this (self‐)destructiveness inherent to the notion of archive fever can be further related to melancholia as it exposes the excessive attachment to the lost object and, in so doing, destroys the object anew to indulge in “the very original gesture of its loss” (Žižek 2000: 660). In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words, “[t]he pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself” (Shelley 1965: 133). The melancholic thus becomes an archive of an object that “is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack” (Žižek 2000: 660):⁷⁸ In short, the mourner mourns the lost object and kills it a second time through symbolizing its loss, while the melancholic is not simply the one who is unable to renounce the object but rather the one who kills the object a second time (treats it as lost) before the object is actually lost. (Žižek: 662)

In this sense, the archive fever’s dynamic structure of conservation and destruction makes it inhabit a liminal position between mourning and melancholia: the feverish construction and subsequent/ensuing destruction of an archive of the lost object renders the initial work of mourning into a narcissistic and (self‐)destructive expression of melancholy. This paradoxical relation between pleasure (Eros) and unpleasure (Thanatos), the fever to archive and the archive’s fever/sickness, is masterfully encapsulated in John Keats’s “Ode on Mel-

 See Kerler (2017: 130 – 131 and 144), in which I developed the central ideas of this paragraph (i. e. a reading of Udo Hock, Slavoj Žižek and P.B. Shelley with regards to melancholy and archive fever).  See Žižek (2000: 658 – 663) for the interpretation of melancholy as an attachment to an object that has never existed as a positive entity.

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ancholy”: “Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine, / Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” (Keats 2000a: ll. 26 – 28). That is, the (un)pleasure of melancholy is only made possible by the archiving of the object desired (“Joy’s grape”, which is literally and figuratively incorporated) and its subsequent destruction (i. e. bursting the grape), the re‐enactment of its loss. Third, the death drive as an excess of the beautiful: the sublime. The latter’s well‐known paradoxical quality, namely the concurrence of pleasure and pain, is fundamentally based on the workings of the death drive since unpleasure constitutes here the source of pleasure: the sublime object (in the Kantian sense) functions as a mirror for the subject, in which the latter realizes its inability to fully apprehend it (and the transcendental ideas it refers to). This realisation – i. e. the coincidence of a surplus of aesthetic enjoyment/experience on the one hand and terror/unpleasure in view of the limited capacity to fully process it on the other hand – engenders the sublime in the first place. Hence, the sublime is a deeply masochistic (i. e. the death drive turned inwards) aesthetic category insofar as it is constituted precisely in the moment when unpleasure is at its peak, i. e. in the moment when subject and object are closest to each other. In short, sublime pleasure is only made possible by unpleasure, that is by the destruction of the object desired.⁷⁹ Following this, it will be argued that the death drive surfaces in the lyrical I’s masochistic experience/enjoyment of the sublime as well in its depiction, respectively archiving in art. With regard to the latter, the subsequent destruction of the (aesthetically) archived sublime corresponds with the destruction drive, i. e. the death drive turned outwards. In both cases, masochism and its (artistic) exteriorisation, the sublime, originates from a surplus of Eros’s binding energy (i.e. the sublime as an excess of the beautiful) and ultimately results in disintegration. To loosely appropriate Jacques Derrida’s words, it is an “erotic simulacrum” (1995: 14) that carries “memories of death” (1995: 14). These “memories of death” can be moreover related to the archival fever to possess the original/absolute origin that was initially mentioned, together with the latter’s relation to the death drive. This can be accounted for in looking at how the sublime may materialise in (the “erotic simulacra” of) images of idealised, paradisiac (original) nature (compulsively) repeated/(re)constructed in art – instances of the sublime(‘s unrepresentable singularity) which, as will be shown later, can be further associated with the Kristevian concepts of the

 See Däuker (2002: 342 - 345) for the outlined relation between the sublime, pleasure and unpleasure. See also Žižek (1998: 202– 204). For the relation between the death drive and the sublime, see also Crockett (2001: 110 – 111).

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chora, the Thing and ultimately, death. The ultimate pleasure arising from the sublime, however, has to be paradoxically located in its unpleasure as well: the sublime’s disintegrative movement can also cause on an affective level that reduction of “inner stimulative tension” (Freud 2003: 95) which can be equated with a (performative) return to the inanimate, that is death.

3 Archives Having outlined the basic interrelations between loss, melancholia, the archive and spectrality, the initial questions must be re-addressed in a more thorough fashion: What kind of archives are determinative for Romantic poetry? How do these poems/archives redouble the paradoxical movement of storage and effacement? And (how) can the elusive death drive be traced in the poems’ rhetoric and aesthetics? In order to respond to these questions, I shall take a closer look at three basic manifestations of archives that prove to be especially relevant for my subsequent analyses: literary spaces, the archiving subject and the poem as archive (i. e. aesthetics, genre, language and its materiality/mediality), each of them describing a further abstraction of the foregoing one. Although these archives are treated separately, for the purpose of theoretical clarity, they are nonetheless closely intertwined and overlap in various ways. Taking these entanglements into account, the interrelations between the concept of “archive fever”, suffering from melancholia and the ensuing philosophical, psychological and aesthetic consequences shall be further laid bare in the following sections.

3.1 (Imagined) Spaces and Objects One of the most basic manifestations of spatial archives is, on the one hand, the literary (re‐)construction (and occasionally accumulation) of real spaces/places and the corresponding cultural artefacts. Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for instance, can be read as a collection – an archive – of various historical spaces/places and cultural artefacts within the timeless realm of art. On the other hand, reconstructed or purely imagined spaces/places can additionally function as archives themselves by transcending their own materiality. That is, literary spaces act as places of memory into which the lost object/time is projected and aesthetically archived. These spaces thereby feature a complex semantic structure which is way beyond a simple mimetic reproduction. Quite the contrary, the “archivization” in the Derridean sense “produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida 1995: 17); and this is especially true for the Romantics

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whose “mind projects itself into space such that the landscape turns into a mental space” (Hanke 1981: 117). In other words, (real) spaces/places and the poet’s memory/subjectivity both supplement and mirror each other (Hanke 1981: 117– 118) – a reciprocal, dialogic process which, for instance, William Wordsworth alludes to when he recalls his former experiences at the Wye Valley in “Tintern Abbey” (its reimagined natural landscape is “By thought supplied”; Wordsworth 2000a: l. 82) or which is boiled down to its essence in the final lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (2000a: ll. 142– 144): “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?” In its most extreme form, these spaces are transcended by the poet’s imagination, unveiling a timeless, infinite and ideal (sublime) space. The latter thereby indicates, in psychoanalytical terms, a rather abstract loss of an ideal kind – a topic that shall be revisited later on. However, before engaging with the aforementioned topic, a brief overview of the cultural context of the time will be necessary in order to better understand the circumstances under which the outlined interrelation between spaces, (lost) time and the human mind/consciousness developed. In fact, the mid-18th to early 19th century was characterised by an increased awareness of (changing) space, its expansion and, not least, by its loss. Making reference to examples that were previously outlined, I turn my attention to Britain’s territorial expansion which required the creation of numerous maps. These maps acted as archives of “geographical knowledge” (Drayton 1998: 238) and also documented the Empire’s rising power (Drayton 1998: 237– 238). Moreover, the numerous modernising processes, first and foremost the Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally changed the country’s geography inasmuch as “a grid or linear geography [was imposed; D.K.] on what were open or ‘common spaces’” (Tally 2013: 110), ultimately leading to a collapse of the traditional village space (Tally 2013: 110). It was particularly during the Romantic period that a substantial number of people were forced to leave the countryside in order to work in the towns’ factories. Together with the parliamentary enclosure movement – which exacerbated “the distinction between owning and renting property” (Jarvis 2004: 20) in favour of fewer landlords – space was not only lost in terms of habitation but also in terms of property (Jarvis 2004: 20 – 23). This resulted in a well-known sense of alienation that can be described as the experience of an “anxious, transcendental homelessness” (Tally 2013: 67), which was, as I shall contend following Robert T. Tally Jr., strikingly coped with the creation of maps and spaces in literature⁸⁰; the latter helping to make sense of, and nav-

 “The act of writing itself might be considered a form of mapping or cartographic activity”

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igate, these spaces which proliferated a sense of estrangement (Tally 2013: 66 – 67, 45 – 46). In other words, the experience of spatial fragmentation and loss (which is also a temporal loss as, for example, the former disease of nostalgia reveals) is both projected onto as well as opposed by the creation of literary maps and spaces. John Clare’s poetry, for instance, is fundamentally characterised by a melancholic (re‐)construction of his lost spaces, a feverish desire to return to a pre-enclosed place and time. Transcending mere representation, these spaces both function as materialisations of his (personal and spatial) losses as well as (idealized) sites of remembrance that provide a sense of archival presence. Finally, it was 18th century philosophy which contributed a great deal to the idea that (literary) spaces, time and the human mind are closely interrelated. Although philosophy was primarily concerned with temporality at that time, there is no denying the fact that influential thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who opposed the Newtonian idea of absolute space by instead conceiving of it as a relational category, or Immanuel Kant, who maintained that “space is a mental construction” (Tally 2013: 29), provided an important philosophical context for a “poetics of space” (Mitchell 1980: 543) beyond the conception of time and space as antithetical absolutes (Mitchell 1980: 542– 544; Tally 2013: 28 – 30). With regard to the possible associations of time/space and the human consciousness/memory – i. e. the notion of spaces as places of memory, that is spatial archives – the British Associationist School must eventually be mentioned. Apart from David Hume’s chapter on the Connexion or Association of Ideas, according to which ideas are associated via “RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place” (Hume 1962: 319), David Hartley is especially worthy of note since Samuel Taylor Coleridge engages at length with the Hartleian theory of association and its development in his Biographia Literaria. By rejecting it as being too mechanical (“the associative power becomes either memory or fancy”; Coleridge 1973: 73), Coleridge eventually paves the way for his own concept of (active, “esemplastic”; Coleridge 1973: 195) imagination instead (Coleridge 1973: chapters V-VII, XIII). Against the backdrop provided above, we can now turn to the issue of how spatial archives – i. e. the interrelation between time, space and the human consciousness/memory – are represented in poetry and how they can be described systematically. The concept of space, its conceptual history and its numerous differentiations constitute a large field of study that eludes any comprehensive systematisation (at least within the scope of the study at hand and its epistemic

(Tally 2013: 45). For a detailed description of the concept of “literary cartography”, see Tally (2013: 44– 78).

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goals).⁸¹ Depending on the particular discipline (e. g. philosophy, geography, mathematics, physics, architecture, art, sociology, cultural studies, literary criticism etc.) and the theoretical approach(es), multitudes of (often contradictory) definitions and implications arise.⁸² With regard to the aims of the present study, “space” can be understood, albeit not exhaustively, as a broader term used to describe the conception, perception, structure, configuration(s) and imaginative (re‐)construction of (extraliterary, material) objects/sites, such as landscapes, nature, natural phenomena, cities or architecture. Within literary texts, such spaces predominantly include (sometimes more, sometimes less) references to the extraliterary, material word, but they may also transcend the “real world” and create purely fictional/imaginary spaces, for example, utopia, fantasy, or the sublime pleasure-dome in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.⁸³ Commonly, there is a distinction between space and place, whereby the former is generally attributed as ‘open’, ‘abstract’, infinite’ and ‘indeterminate’, and the latter as ‘specific’, ‘limited’ or ‘made concrete’ (Pawlitzki 2015: 59 – 60). In his seminal work The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau takes up this dualism and (re)defines place as “an instantaneous configuration of positions” (1988: 117) which is transformed into a space via the act of its concretisation/actualisation: Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. […] in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. […] In short, space is a practiced place. (de Certeau 1988: 117)

While place is to be regarded as “a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead, the law of ‘place’” (de Certeau 1988: 118), space is determined “through operations which […] specify ‘spaces’ by the actions of historical subjects” (de Certeau 1988: 118). Within de Certeau’s phenomenological conception, nevertheless, the distinction between place and space should not be understood as a simple subject/object dualism but instead,

 See, exemplarily, Nünning (2008: 604– 607); Tally (2013: 4); or Pawlitzki (2015: 67– 94).  Tellingly, the concise glossary of Robert T. Tally Jr.’s excellent volume Spatiality (2013) does not contain an entry for “space”.  For the outlined definition of “space” and its possible (general) manifestations in literary texts see Nünning (2008: 604– 607) and Tally (2013: 42– 43, 146 – 154).

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as closely and performatively intertwined. These performative acts that transform places into spaces are primarily cultural practices and stories (Bushell 2010: 45 – 46): Stories, according to de Certeau, are a continuous process of turning places into spaces and vice versa, structuring these complex interdependencies in potentially unlimited (aesthetic) forms (de Certeau 1988: 118). In so doing, stories are fragmented in the sense that they are also constantly constructing boundaries between various spaces/places. These are structured by frontiers and bridges, which can adopt a mediating and/or differentiating role (de Certeau 1988: 123 – 128). In addition, two fundamental descriptive modes can be established, i.e. “map” vs. “tour” (de Certeau 1988: 119). While the descriptive mode of “map” is primarily characterised by exhibiting, seeing, setting an order (de Certeau 1988: 119 – 121), a “tour” focuses on movement and “spatializing actions” (de Certeau 1988: 119). Proceeding from practices, both modes are intertwined in many ways, yet nevertheless differ in their descriptive-performative foci (de Certeau 1988: 118– 121). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s depictions of spaces in “Mont Blanc”, for example, follows both modes of “map” and “tour” in that seeing and doing/movement, setting the place and actively constructing the space, almost coincide. With regard to literary texts, we can furthermore say with de Certeau that writing and the imaginative (re‐)construction of (extraliterary) objects/sites serves to transform place into space This is especially true for Romantic aesthetics since it is characterised by its subjectivity and imaginative (re‐)construction of its objects, exceeding mere mimetic representation.⁸⁴ At the same time, these textual configurations constitute places that the reader has to actualise within the act of reading, thus again, turning them into spaces. The concepts of space and place are – seen from the perspective of authorial production and reader-response – hence also closely interrelated, revealing many overlapping features (de Certeau 1988: 117– 118). Finally, this conversion of textual place into textual space can be related to the writer and to the manuscript as object, i.e. to acts of re-reading and re‐writing in the context of various versions of manuscripts (Bushell 2010: 47): Could one not therefore see the writer, writing, as a “tactician” seeking to create space for his own voice within the dominant language structure? Could one not view the surviving draft materials of a text in a state of process as a kind of resistant meaningful narrative, paradoxically set against the dominance of the final text that they will, cumulatively, bring into being? […] To what extent is Certeau’s pleasing account of “reader as poacher” problematized by the “uninhabitable” space of the manuscript page and the need to map and journey through this space differently from that of a published work of art? (Bushell 2010: 47)

 See Ferguson (2009) for the restructuring of notions of representation in the Romantic era.

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Against this backdrop, the following three dimensions of Certeau’s place/space distinction can be abstracted: (1) The text as a whole in the context of authorial production, i. e. the author turns extraliterary places into literary spaces via imagination; the perspective of authorial production also involves the re-reading and re-writing of manuscripts. (2) Seen from an inner-fictional perspective, these literary spaces can be also regarded as (literary) places that can be transformed into spaces (and vice versa) by characters and/or the lyrical I. This also applies to inner-literary instances of re-visioning/remembering, such as in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (i. e. the spaces depicted in the first part of “Kubla Khan” become places of a potential poem, potential spatial practices, in the second part). (3) The text as a whole in the context of reader‐response, i. e. the poem as a place that is turned into a space during the act of reading. Since Romantic imaginative appropriations of places are always already spaces, I will refer to such depictions largely as “spaces” while nevertheless keeping in mind their phenomenological relation to the notion of “place”, and will differentiate (also with regard to the three outlined dimensions) where necessary in view of the epistemic goals of the present study. Turning back to the initial question (i. e. the interrelation of time and space in literary works and how it functions as spatial archive), I shall primarily draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, which he developed using the example of the novel exclusively, and reread its relevant aspects with regard to Romantic poetry and the notion of archive fever. According to Bakhtin (2008: 7– 8), the idea of chronotope can be basically understood as the meaningful conjunction of time and space in literary works. Both categories are closely interrelated inasmuch as time is projected into space and space is in turn structured by time. In short, space is temporalised and time is spatialised, both of them becoming unified within the literary chronotope. ⁸⁵ Seen from the perspective of Derrida’s Archive Fever, the latter can be regarded as a manifestation of an archive insofar as the (literary, imagined) space constitutes the substrate into which the substance (time, memory, experiences) is inscribed (Derrida 1995: 10, 22). Furthermore, Bakhtin’s remark that this inscription (respectively the chronotope) represents a spatiotemporal and contentual unity proves to be equally decisive for the Derridean concept of the archive considering how the latter is fundamentally characterised as being a meaningful whole, a synthesis of heterogeneous elements. This unity is achieved by the so-called “archontic principle” (Derrida

 Starting from this basic definition, Bakhtin, however, uses the concept of chrontope for various meanings and contexts throughout the book. For a comprehensive overview of its different usages, see Frank and Mahlke (2008: 205 – 207).

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1995: 10), i. e. acts of consignation (Derrida 1995: 10, 22) – a process that can be related to the Romantic poets’ synthesising imagination which similarly aims to establish a (organic) unity: “Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” (Derrida 1995: 10). With that said, two characteristics related to the chronotope’s archiving capabilities turn out to be especially worthy of note: First, the chronotope occupies a central position within the literary work as it structures, mirrors and concretises its subject and themes (such as philosophical and social abstractions, motifs, events etc.). That is, the chronotope acts as a powerful spatial archive insofar as it visualises an event/theme/subject within the scope of its spatiotemporal densification (Bachtin 2008: 187– 188). Second, this literary (inner) chronotope may also reflect (elements of) the real (outer) chronotope and thus functions as a repository/archive of cultural memory which, in turn, may also react upon reality over the course of the literary work’s reception (Bachtin 2008: 8, 58, 186 – 187, 191– 192; Frank and Mahlke 2008: 205). Finally, it has to be noted that a literary work is usually constituted by various chronotopes which are together characterised by a dialogic relation to each other, i. e. they may coexist, intertwine, supplement, mirror or contrast with each other (Bachtin 2008: 190). *** It goes without saying that an analysis of spatial archives and their individual manifestations and functions should always be based on the particular case. Nevertheless, I shall take a closer look at three of Bakhtin’s exemplarily described chronotopes that – notwithstanding the fact that these were derived from various novels – turn out to be equally relevant for Romantic poetry and shall serve as a starting point for my subsequent interpretations. First, the “idyllic chronotope”, which functions as a place of remembrance for a lost naturalness as a consequence of processes of modernisation and urbanisation. Following Bakhtin, the idyllic chronotope very much owed its heyday in the 18th century to an increased awareness of temporality at that time. In view of an advancing temporal and spatial fragmentation, the idyllic chronotope provided a safe haven – an archive – of organic time and space, which were (endangered to be) lost during those revolutionary times (such as in John Clare’s “On Visiting a Favourite Place”, which serves as a spatial archive, an idealised conjunction of lost time and space which the poet can retreat to in the course of his poetic re-visit). The idyllic chronotope is generally characterised by cyclical, natural rhythms of time which are projected onto the respective spaces: the concurrence of life/cradle and death/tombstone, childhood and old age, and finally in an organic relation between humankind and nature (Bachtin 2008: 161– 164). Aspects

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of this chronotope can also be seen, for example, in the graveyard poets’ elegiac meditations on death and loss (such as in Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts”, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” or Thomas Parnell’s “A Night Piece on Death”). Not only did they spatialise the experience of (an increasing) temporal loss (see e. g. Young’s “Night Thoughts” (2008: ll. 55 – 56): “The bell strikes one. We take no note of time / But from its loss”) by abounding images of tombstones, graveyards and ruins, but they also projected it onto the promise of the afterlife, the eschatological space of paradise. In so doing, they also reconstructed (Christian) cycles of death and rebirth or, in other words, archived religious notions that were threatened by the rapidly advancing sciences and processes of secularisation.⁸⁶ William Wordsworth in succession, however, rather focuses on the concurrence of life and death, i. e. he sees them as natural cycles and often supposes a presence of the dead within their absence: in “We are Seven”, for instance, the child plays on her dead siblings’ graves, suggesting a strong spiritual presence of the departed while also opposing the rationality of the adult lyrical I; “There was a Boy” ends with an enigmatic juxtaposition of “the churchyard [that; D.K.] hangs / Upon a slope above the village‐school” (Wordsworth 1992 f: ll. 27– 28), which mirrors the poet’s growth of mind and reveals the formative and haunting influence that his lost/dead childhood still has on him as an adult. Both examples feature an idyllic chronotope which fuses (lost) time and memory within literary spaces, thereby both archiving and mourning this loss. A second characteristic chronotope can be witnessed in the Romantics’ transformation of natural landscapes into atemporal visions of originality and existential totality. According to Amala M. Hanke, the idea of nature as space has an important function in Romantic literature insofar as it is “the catalytic ground in which the spatiotemporal integration of consciousness is anchored and the experience of eternity in time is made possible” (1981: 117). That is, the poet transcends the material and finite space of reality via imagination, bringing to light its unspoilt infinite essence, the “Urgrund of existence” (Hanke 1981: 117) or “unitary primal condition” (Hanke 1981: 152). The latter not only refers to nature but also to the poet whose enhanced state of mind is redoubled in the respective spaces, altogether constituting an ontological unity (Hanke 1981: 117– 118, 152– 153, 159). To put it briefly in the prophetic words of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1988a: 39): “If the doors of percep-

 It goes without saying that religion still played an important role in the 18th century, especially within the context of deism, which was, to a certain extent, consistent with reason. For the role of religion in the 18th century, see McInelly (2009) and the essays in Duncan (2009).

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tion were cleansed everything would appear to man as its, infinite.” Such a depiction of (sublime) nature, in which the finite space becomes infinite and time is eternalised (Hanke 1981: 168 – 169, 117), can be related to the Bakhtinian chronotope of the “miraculous world”; a subjective play with time and space (i. e. various dreamlike deformations, such as a play with perspectives, spatial relations and/or accelerations/decelerations), suggesting a higher reality/meaning beyond conventional spatiotemporal reality (Bachtin 2008: 84– 85). Natural objects within this chronotope – such as mountains which connect the terrestrial/finite with the celestial/infinite or clouds/sky, which represent spatial infinity (Hanke 1981: 138 – 140) – constitute in their entirety a spatial archive which unveils and eternalises a vision of the infinite totality⁸⁷ of existence and ultimate origin. With that said, we need to take another look at what it means to suffer from archive fever. Following Derrida, [i]t is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it […] It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (1995: 57) In a way the term [archive; D.K.] indeed refers, as one would correctly believe, to the arkhḗ in the physical, historical, or ontological sense, which is to say to the originary, the first, the principal, the primitive, in short to the commencement. (1995: 9)

Accordingly, the aforementioned transformations of natural landscapes into infinite, timeless spaces of originality and existential totality (i. e. suggesting an ontological unity between nature and humankind) very much correspond with the fever to archive as they both suggest a return to the unspoilt origin of existence, a primal state. Furthermore, this can be extended to the Romantics’ frequent depictions of secret places such as chasms, caverns or the depths of forests (Hanke 1981: 117), which similarly “stems from their search for evidence of a primal golden past and unity of being that have been lost in the present” (Hanke 1981: 117) In this respect, we shall not forget the historical circumstances under which the major Romantic poems evolved, namely the French Revolution. Although the formative phase of Romanticism was characterised by great expectations and “apocalyptic imaginings, which endowed the promise of France with the form and impetus of one of the deepest rooted and most compelling myths in

 See also Hanke (2008: 153): “The work of art is thereby equipped to suggest the ontology of self and world as one tempero-eternal whole in which each spatial and temporal part preserves its identity yet is part of their transcendental unity.”

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the culture of Christian Europe” (Abrams 1963: 37) (the promise of a paradise regained), the revolution’s outcome resulted in a fundamental sense of disillusionment (Abrams 1963: 30 – 55): “The great Romantic poems were written not in the mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the later mood of revolutionary disillusionment or despair” (Abrams 1963: 53). Hence, infinite and original spaces depicted in literature are not only spatial archives of a lost origin/naturalness occurring in response to the alienating effects of industrialisation, but also archives of a lost paradise; a paradise that most notably materialised with the prospects of the French Revolution. This lost paradise is, nevertheless, closely related to a yearning for a paradise to come as revealed through its close affiliation with the chronotope of “historical inversion”. According to Bakhtin, the latter refers to spaces that depict paradisaic scenes of harmony, myths of a golden age, the timeless essence of being or notions surrounding a natural, primal state. Although these (sublime) spaces are located in a remote past – spatially mirrored by remote regions such as in the sky, underground, in the sea or at the end of the earth – they nonetheless point towards the future. The yearning for a particular ideal that is to be realised in the future is projected into a factually non-existent and idealised past; thus, attributing a certain reality to this ideal (Bachtin 2008: 74– 77). Such spatial archives are, following Derrida, fundamentally spectral inasmuch as they undermine the opposition between past and future, the repetition of the idealised past within the archive becoming the experience of a future (promise) that could return (Derrida 1995: 45, 27– 28; Derrida 2006: 45 – 48): The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (Derrida 1995: 27– 28)

3.2 The Melancholic Subject Up to this point much has been said about the various ways in which literary spaces can operate as archives, i. e. how they fuse time, space and memory into a (organic) unity, while also discussing the functions of exemplary and closely interrelated chronotopes. However, we still need to address the issue of le mal d’archive with regard to these spatial archives – or in a more general sense, aesthetic/poetic archives – more precisely by questioning the following: to what extent are spatial archives expressions of a fundamental fever to archive (a) and do they feature self-destructive elements (b) which efface the material

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they actually try to preserve (i. e. the archive’s “sickness”)? These questions are substantially entangled with the subjectivity/psychology of the poet since these spaces are literary and imagined. From a superordinate perspective, the subject itself becomes an archive precisely by constructing the aforementioned (spatial) archives and projecting its subjectivity onto them or, put differently, by incorporating the (lost) object into its subjective structure. As will be shown in the following paragraphs, the feverish construction of archives and the latter’s self‐destructive tendencies go hand in hand with a fundamental melancholic disposition. Following Sigmund Freud, the fundamental difference between mourning and melancholia lies in the melancholic subject’s excessive relation to the lost object (of love). This loved object can be, for example, a concrete one (e. g. a loved person) or a more abstract one, such as an ideal (e. g. the ideals of the French Revolution) or one’s country (put differently: a loss of spaces as, for instance, within the context of the Enclosure Movement). The melancholic is unable to sublimate its loss, that is, to project it onto an Ersatzobjekt and, in so doing, dissolve its libidinal attachment. Instead, the libidinal attachment to the lost object is projected into the ego and narcissistically incorporated.⁸⁸ While Freud describes melancholia as an excessive/compulsive object relation, Julia Kristeva ascribes melancholia’s origins to the separation from the mother and the very failure of an object relation. Accordingly, the melancholic’s lost object lies beyond the symbolic order, it is an unrepresentable and indeterminate “Thing”, and can thus not be mourned/sublimated. (Lechte 1990: 185 – 186; Kristeva: 1989: 5 – 6, 11– 15). As I will argue in the course of this study, the loss of a concrete or more abstract object (in the Freudian sense) must also be reflected upon in view of the possibility of a more archaic loss, namely, in the Kristevian sense, the loss of the mother. Notwithstanding the conceptual differences between Kristeva’s and Freud’s concepts of melancholia, though, they both conceive it as an excessive libidinal attachment (even in its failure; or precisely because of its failure) through which the melancholic strives to possess the lost object (or, in its most abstracted and ultimate consequence, the Thing). That is, the subject becomes a spectral archive of this lost object in the course of its excessive, narcissistic archiving that denies the possibility of such a loss, overall constituting the melancholic’s archival fever.⁸⁹

 Freud (1982: 197, 202– 204). See also Boulter (2011: 1– 6) for the connection between Derrida’s concept of archive fever and Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia.  See Kerler (2017: 129 – 130), in which I developed the central ideas of this paragraph.

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The excessive attachment to the lost object, that is the feverish desire to archive/possess it, can be described best with Kristeva’s concept of the denial of negation. According to this concept, a successful act of mourning requires that the subject accepts the loss of the object (the mother) in the first place. Thereupon, however, the separation from the mother is negated by deferring it to symbolic representations⁹⁰, i.e. to the signifier (of the linguistic system) where the subject believes it possible to reconstruct or recover the lost object within the symbolic, that is language. This means, in a more abstract sense, that signifiers (and language in general) are meaningful for the subject precisely because the object (Thing) is lost and – initially – accepted as such. The melancholic, by contrast, denies this negation insofar as he does not accept the loss from the very beginning. This denial prevents a successful repression of the traumatic loss and its symbolic working-through and, as such, the signifier, signified and semiotic drives are fundamentally separated from each other, unable to form meaningful conjunctions. As a consequence, the melancholic is ultimately unable to mourn since the loss is not successfully repressed; that is, the loss is not deferred to the symbolic via the signifying process but is, instead, continuously evoked within the imaginary space of the psychic apparatus (Kristeva 1989: 40 – 47, 60 – 61). Drawing on the Derridean notions of spectrality and the archive previously outlined, it can be said that the lost object returns here as a(n) (un)dead spectral signifier that haunts the melancholic archiving subject. With that said, one could question whether John Keats’s melancholic tone in his work originates in great measure from the excessive and feverish attachment just described? Is it untrue to deem Keats’s concept of negative capability – i. e. an immersive identification with the object desired, outside any epistemological and subjective frames of reference, i. e. “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”, as Keats (2012: 967) puts it in his famous letter to his brothers – as a rather narcissistic incorporation of the object, whereby the self loses its identity (Ich‐Verarmung)?⁹¹ And doesn’t this ultimately signal a more fundamental experience of melancholic loss, name-

 See, in this regard, also Kristeva’s concept of matricide, according to which “the lost object is recovered as erotic object (as is the case for male heterosexuality or female homosexuality), or it is transposed by means of an unbelievable symbolic effort, the advent of which one can only admire, which eroticizes the other (the other sex, in the case of the heterosexual woman) or transforms cultural constructs into a ‘sublime’ erotic object” (Kristeva 1989: 28).  See, in this regard, also Bode (2008: 206 – 210). Bode explains how the concept of negative capability entails a poet without identity who acts as a kind of receptive container, filled by the indetermancy and heterogenity of the object. During this process of total identification with the object, the poet eventually abandons his own identity.

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ly the archaic loss of the Thing (which is precisely characterised by its indeterminableness or, to appropriate Keats’s words, “uncertainties, Mysteries and doubts”)? In other words, Keats’s aesthetics of negative capability correspond to a melancholic archival desire to possess the lost object (and in its ultimate consequence, the Thing) beyond any distorting representation, to grasp it in its singularity/originality. Such a total and excessive identification with the object⁹² – an identification which welcomes the object’s/the Thing’s indeterminacy and heterogeneity – is only possible beyond the reality principle, beyond any symbolic order and hence, following Kristeva, a melancholic denial of negation. In this sense, the Keatsian concept of negative capability can be ultimately read as an aesthetic re-enactment of the original loss in which the poet obtains his ambivalent, melancholic pleasure by relishing “the very original gesture of its loss” (Žižek 2000: 660), by becoming an archive of this loss/lost object. But before expanding upon this matter, we must first scrutinise the aesthetic manifestations of the denial of negation. According to Kristeva, one of its defining features is that it comes disguised in the form of a “beautiful facade” (1989: 55): Although the melancholic cannot form meaningful conjunctions within language, he does not lose this ability completely⁹³ because he still retains it in the form of absurd, split signifiers which can provide a mainly semiotic⁹⁴ and – partially – sublimatory access to the lost object. That is, the melancholic articulates the Thing’s indeterminableness and its loss via hyper-signs (which, I suggest, can be also related to instances of the sublime). These hyper-signs refer to a timeless ideal beyond the symbolic order, often a hyperbolic idealised past (as for instance manifested in the aforementioned chronotopes of “historical inversion”  See, in this regard, also Keats’s famous letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27th, 1818), in which he explains his idea of the “camelion poet”: “What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. […] A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creature.” (Keats: 1958a: 387).  Julia Kristeva sees melancholia and depression as two interwoven states that, despite their clinical and nosologic differences, cannot be separated from each other clearly as they are both grounded on the insupportableness of the loss of an object and the failure of the signifier. Whereas melancholia is characterised by symptoms of inhibition and asymbolia, a neurotic depression shows weaker symptoms. However, these states may change into each other, which explains the aforementioned capability of the melancholic to still use signs and language at times (Kristeva 1989: 9 – 11). To simplify matters, I will solely use the term melancholia over the course of this study, though, nevertheless, implying its interwovenness with depression.  For a differentiation between the symbolic and semiotic, see Suchsland (1992: 81, 86 ff.); Kristeva (1986b: 37) and Kristeva (1986a: 90 ff., 120 ff.).

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and “miraculous world”), evoking feelings of omnipotence and aesthetic exaltation (Kristeva 1989: 46 – 55, 59 – 64, 97– 100). This constitutes a crucial point for the argument of the study at hand: within their work, the melancholic poet – or the artist in general – can inhabit a liminal position between a sublimatory archiving of the lost object (i. e. the negation of its loss via the symbolic and/or its semiotisation) on the one hand, and its/his/her (self‐)destruction (i. e. the re‐enactment of its loss via the denial of negation) on the other hand. In this manner, the artist gives voice to both kinds of losses (sublimatory-symbolic and melancholic‐destructive) by constructing a poetic persona (or various personae) which oscillates between those two poles, that is between sublimation and asymbolia (Kristeva 1989: 63 – 66, 97– 101, 145 – 146; Lechte 1990: 187).⁹⁵ In other words: due to its feverish, melancholic desire to archive, the subject not only becomes itself an archive, but is also marked by the latter’s self‐destructive tendencies, which combined constitute a highly precarious identity. As I will argue later on, the aesthetics of genius in the Romantic era (such as the ability to transcend the material world via imagination and lay bare its timeless, infinite essence of being, or the aesthetic reconstructions of the “Urgrund of existence”; Hanke 1981: 117) together with the respective poems’ frequent protodeconstructive character⁹⁶ frequently display traces of these mechanisms, unveiling a deep‐rooted melancholic disposition.⁹⁷ This disposition manifests itself in a feverish desire to archive “the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Derrida 1995: 57, see also 54), an Ursprungssehnsucht which is fundamentally indebted to le mal d’archive. In the face of this loss – be it the pre-oedipal motherchild-dyad, the Thing or its hypostasis, paradise – it is especially during the pe See, in this regard, also Pfau (2005: 323): “melancholy is not merely informed by the failure of such metonymic, narrative progression but reconstitutes and positively displays that failure as an alternative expressive form.”  As Aidan Day remarks with respect to post-structuralist and deconstructive readings, “Romanticism’s claims to have found through symbolic language a means of uniting the subject, the self, in all its temporality, with a larger, often transcendental, object were a delusion. They were a delusion occasionally recognised or half-recognised in Romantic poetry itself” (Day, 2012: 108). See also McGann (2004: 118 – 119). For a comprehensive overview of psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings of Romantic literature, see also Hogle (2010: 10 – 15).  See, in a different context, also Gerold Sedlmayr’s study on the Discourse of Madness in Britain, 1790 – 1815, which shows that “in the Romantic period, the relationship between human agency, creative originality and madness is negotiated anew.” (204) With regard to the notion of the poet as genius, Sedlmayr observes that it “seems to be a concoction of highly suspicious ingredients: he falls into raptures or ‘outbursts’ that he cannot explain, uses language in order to mediate meanings that are inexpressible by language, and deems himself able to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite. No wonder that traditionally the poet has been connected with madness” (2011: 162– 163).

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riod of Romanticism in which the subject becomes an archive. For the restoration of paradise respectively the symbolic/imaginary “return to the authentic and singular origin” (Derrida 1995: 54) takes place within the subject: “the restoration of paradise […] is still symbolised by a sacred marriage. But the hope has been shifted from the history of mankind to the mind of the single individual, from militant external action to an imaginative act” (Abrams 1963: 59), or to put it in Harold Bloom’s words, “[English Romanticism] is an internalisation of romance, particularly of the quest variety […] The poet takes the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative life” (Bloom 2004: 3). Hence, such poems are not only (unconscious) manifestations of the poet’s inherent sense of loss and archival desire, but also symbolic/imaginative reconstructions, archivings, of this lost origin within the poem’s persona(s) *** Nevertheless, all these (re)constructions are merely fragile façades. Already underscored by Sigmund Freud, the melancholic’s regression into the self also transforms the former object of desire into an object of hate; as every object relation is inherently characterised by an ambivalence of love and hate (Ambivalenzkonflikt), the narcissistic identification with the lost object ultimately results in self-destructive symptoms, such as self‐reproach, self-hate or even suicidal tendencies (Ich-Verarmung). In short, due to the subject’s narcissistic identification, the loss of the object also means a loss of the self (Freud 1982: 203–205, 210 – 211; Kristeva 1989: 11– 13). The melancholic’s (archival) act of introjection, therefore, simultaneously carries the seed of its own destruction, ultimately revealing how melancholia is also fundamentally indebted to the annihilative inclinations of le mal d’archive. Similarly, Julia Kristeva emphasises that behind the curtain of their inventive/artful aesthetic productions – which seek to cover the subject’s most archaic loss under a timeless, archived ideal of aesthetic creativity and excess – lies the abyss of loss and ultimately death (Kristeva 1989: 54– 55, 97– 100): On one side, the artist tries to archive the lost object “through the semiotic dimension of the signifying process” (Lechte 1990: 187), i.e. by reconstructing the Thing/chora in the space of the imaginary (Lechte: 1990: 187; Suchsland 1992: 117ff.; Kristeva 1989: 97–100). On the other side, these archivings bear traces of their own effacement, indicating the workings of the death drive beneath the surface of these artistic simulacra.⁹⁸ It is precisely at this neuralgic  “The imaginative capability of Western man, which is fulfilled within Christianity, is the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning. This is a survival of idealization–the imaginary constitutes a miracle, but it is at the same time its shattering: a self-illusion, nothing but dreams and words, words, words . . .” (Kristeva 1989: 103).

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point, the threshold between the construction of sublimatory sense and its destruction (Kristeva 1989: 100–101), where the archive becomes constituted as such: the archive […] will never be memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. (Derrida 1995: 14)

These (self‐)destructive tendencies may generally come into view in the following ways: first of all, the melancholic’s use of language is repetitive and monotonous, denoting a moment of deceleration and ultimately stasis. This can be seen, for instance, at the level of prosody (such as alliterations or repetitive rhythms) or in larger syntactical structures, the former indicating a semiotic substrate within the symbolic (i.e. a means to articulate the Thing’s unrepresentability within the imaginary).⁹⁹ In this context, the previous observations regarding the death drive should be recalled since it is closely related to compulsive repetition; not only does it strive to restore/return to a previous (original) state via acts of repetition but it ultimately describes a movement towards the inanimate, death. Against this backdrop, it is remarkable to find many instances of deceleration, or even stasis, precisely at the peak of imaginative (re)constructions; for example, Shelley’s depiction of Mont Blanc’s “still” (2000a: l. 61) summit (surrounded by abounding static images like “mountains”, “ice and rock” or the alliterating pairs in “frozen floods” and “silent snow”; 2001a: ll. 62, 63, 64, 74) or Wordsworth’s “There was Boy”, which reaches its climax with the boy’s sublime experience of “pauses of deep silence” (1992f: l. 17), conveying “a gentle shock of mild surprise” (1992f.: l. 19). In both cases, as I will show at a later point, the aesthetic-imaginative climaxes not only unveil a melancholic disposition (i.e. the feverish desire to archive the most archaic loss, the Thing, disguised as depictions of sublime nature) but also the death drive’s actions (here: repetition and stasis) behind these melancholic façades of the sublime and beautiful. In contrast to these instances of deceleration, Julia Kristeva points out that the melancholic may also display the complete opposite symptoms: acceleration, associative originality and cognitive creativity (Kristeva 1989: 59). This ties in with the aforesaid sublimatory access to the Thing via hyper-signs, but also with the death drive’s relation to the sublime. That is, the latter emerges as an

 Kristeva (1989: 35, 38 – 44, 97– 98). See, in this regard, also Schmitt (1990: 22– 25) and Pfau (2005: 326): “melancholic speech identifies as a self-conscious, fatigued symptomatic form that disables the romantic paradigms of spontaneity and expressivity before our very eyes.”

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excess of the beautiful which bears traces of its own disintegration due to its correlation with unpleasure. Be it acceleration or deceleration, the melancholic’s (destructive) symptoms can, therefore, be generally characterised as the experience of a decentred temporality arising from a denial of negation. Seen from this perspective, it eventually becomes clear why the previously discussed chronotopes of the “miraculous world” and “historical inversion” are, in fact, expressions of the lyrical I’s melancholy. Although being powerful spatial (and aesthetic) archives, their temporal distortions and evocations of sublime spaces ultimately imply a narcissistic incorporation of the lost object/Thing – i.e. an excessive re-enactment of its loss – and the inevitable breakdown of the signifying process, overall adding to the archive’s spectrality. This breakdown, the destabilisation of representation, is a final characteristic of melancholia’s self-destructive tendencies and, not least, of the archive’s fever within this psychoanalytical context. As has been argued before, the melancholic’s denial of negation encompasses a disunity of signifier, signified and semiotic drives, preventing the subject to construct (or rather experience) meaningful conjunctions within the symbolic. This may, according to Kristeva, manifest itself in a general loss of reference, a semiotisation of language’s suprasegmental structure (such as rhythm or intonation), or in fragmented lexemes (Kristeva 1989: 35, 38 – 55, 59 – 64, 97– 100). On that note, we could also ask whether John Keats’s frequent use of synaesthesia may not be read as a symptom of a disruption between signifier and signified, a general loss of reference due to the combination of its disparate sensory faculties? In short, the melancholic subject’s house of language (which is also to be understood as an archive) turns out, in fact, to be a “crypt” (Kristeva 1989: 53) for the Thing: not only is its unrepresentability – paradoxically – represented by the breakdown of the signification process but, in so doing, its very loss is also continually re‐enacted (Kristeva 1989: 51–58). With Slavoj Žižek (2000: 660) it can be ultimately contended that such an act of introjection of the lost object, its archiving, is in fact “nothing but the positivization of a void or lack” (Žižek 2000: 660).

3.3 Poetic Form and Materialities In William Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence, we encounter a piper who is continuously urged by a child on a cloud to re-enact a song. During this re‐enactment, the song is getting less and less spontaneous until the piper eventually writes it down in “a book that all may read” (1988b: l. 14) As indicated by the piper’s “rural pen” (1988b: l. 17) with which he “stain’d the water clear” (1988b: l. 18) and the vanishing of the child (who represents the no-

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tion of innocence) precisely at the point when he begins to write, the poem suggests that the very act of writing is inevitably bound to a loss of innocence. The metapoetic quality of Blake’s poem ties in with the question of the poem as archive, i.e. with the influence of aesthetics, genre, language and, not least, the medium’s materiality on the archived object: the act of archiving is never “innocent” for as soon as the object is made subject to archival processes, it inevitably becomes affected by the poem/archive’s internal logic as well as by its power structures and materiality. A brief re-reading of the major poetological texts of the Romantics, with a view towards their discursive appropriation of notions related to the archive, shall further elucidate this. William Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 2006a: 1498) as basis for “all good poetry” (Wordsworth 2006a: 1498) is just one aspect of the creative process because these primary impressions must be, as a second step, contemplated (“recollected in tranquility”; Wordsworth 2006a: 1506) and eventually imaginatively re‐enacted (i.e. stored) within the composition of the poem (Wordsworth 2006a: 1506; Wordsworth 1974a: 26–27). A similar process is described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his concepts of primary and secondary imagination. Whereas the former refers to a general insight into the infinite and timeless ideal of being, its essence,¹⁰⁰ the latter is an artistic reproduction of these impressions: “The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former [primary imagination; D.K.], co-existing with the conscious will” (Coleridge 1973: 202). Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s concepts of imagination are essentially rooted in archival processes since it is especially the act of reiterating (or rather timeless recording of) former impressions that plays a crucial role. The piece of art functions here as an archive (i. e. as the substrate into which the material is inscribed), providing a “spectral messianicity” (Derrida 1995: 28) for the poet, namely the possibility of (and coincident archival desire for) the return of the singularity of the original experience.¹⁰¹ However, these acts of archiving are not simple reproductions but repetitions with difference, ultimately culminating in a higher, unifying synthesis: Coleridge’s “echo” of the primary imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; […] to idealize and unify”¹⁰²; and Wordsworth

 “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge 1973: 202).  Derrida (1995: 45, 27– 28) and Derrida (2006: 45 – 48) for the spectral relation between past and future (in/of the archive).  Coleridge (1973: 202). See also Coleridge (1973: 107– 151) for the notion of “esemplastic” imagination.

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(1974a: 27, 30 – 31, 33 – 34) highlights the creative, shaping power of imagination so that the “materials of poetry” are both “collected and produced” (Wordsworth 1974a: 27) in the resulting piece of art. This is also echoed in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, according to which “[poetry; D.K.] creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our mind by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” (Shelley 1965: 137). In other words, the shown concepts of imagination further correspond to the idea of archive fever insofar as they are similarly based on the dialectics of appropriation/archiving and destruction, ultimately resulting in a (re)creation of its materials. Most notably, it is this process of (re)creation, the archive’s productive aspect, which, according to Derrida, makes up a central characteristic of the archive: the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (Derrida 1995: 17) Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. (Derrida 1995: 18)

Moreover, the outcome of these artistic archiving processes features further remarkable links with the outlined concept of archive fever. Through artistic imagination, the Romantic poets seek to bridge the gap between subject and object, striving to transcend the mere phenomenal and lay bare the object’s timeless, infinite essence of being by sympathetically recreating it. Be it Wordsworth’s poetry, whose object is a general truth (Wordsworth 2006a: 1504– 1506) achieved by the imagination’s abstracting power along with a capacity “to incite and to support the eternal” (Wordsworth 1974a: 36 – 37, see also 30 – 34), Coleridge’s idealising echo of primary imagination’s “eternal act of creation” (Coleridge 1973: 202), Shelley’s poetry of “eternal truth” (Shelley 1965: 115) which “lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms” (Shelley 1965: 137), or John Keats’s immersive identification within the scope of negative capability, all of them coincide with what M.H. Abrams has expressed with his famous metaphor of the mirror and the lamp; that is, a shift from a mimetic reproduction of the object towards a sympathetic identification that can capture its essence, its ideal quality (Abrams 1953). Or to put it in Paul de Man’s (1984: 6) words, “[t] he image is inspired by a nostalgia for the natural object, expanding to become nostalgia for the origin of this object.” And it is precisely this desire to recreate – that is, to archive and possess – the object in its unspoilt, primal originality (i. e. in its natural being) which corresponds to a fundamental fever to archive.

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The concepts of imagination that have been outlined demonstrate how Romantic aesthetics both archive and determine/shape its materials, thereby destroying the latter and (re)creating them in their ideality. This dialectic of destruction and construction is particularly welcomed as it corresponds to the archival desire to possess the unspoilt original.¹⁰³ Nevertheless, even these recreated – ideal – objects are, on a meta level, equally affected by the archive’s (self‐) destructive tendencies, as has been revealed through my discussion on the manifestations of the death drive and the archiving subject’s melancholic disposition. This is something that many Romantic poems are very well aware of since they often self-referentially question their own structures¹⁰⁴ while respectively addressing the inadequacy of their archiving processes. A vivid example of this (de)constructive double movement can be found in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. As the poem’s preface suggests, the lyrical “I” is literally affected by an archive fever, i. e. the fever to both write down/archive the (opium‐induced) primary imagination’s impressions. The subsequent poem, then, becomes the secondary imagination’s echo of the former; tellingly, however, it is merely a re‐visioned “fragment” of its totality. As such, “Kubla Khan” simultaneously constructs and deconstructs its archive, metapoetically addressing its own archival processes, and therewith organically constitutes itself. *** Closely related to the issue of (Romantic) aesthetics is also the question of genre. As William Wordsworth further writes in his “Preface to 1815”, the (re)created objects of poetry “are cast, by means of various moulds, into diverse forms” (Wordsworth 1974a: 27). That is, not only are these objects shaped by the transforming powers of imagination, but also the genre itself turns into “a place of consignation” (Derrida 1995: 22), a substrate into which these newly created materials are inscribed. In the act of choosing a specific genre, a powerful new archive is thus created, grafting its own structures onto these materials and further shaping them.¹⁰⁵ From the perspective of Derrida’s archive fever, the use of a specific genre necessitates the so-called “archontic power” (Derrida 1995: 10), i. e.

 See, in a related context, also Goodman (2008: 95 – 216), who argues that “[t]he new ‘home’ for the historical disease formerly known as nostalgia […] lies in Romantic-era writings on aesthetics” (Goodman 2008: 197).  See Day (2012: 108) and McGann (2004: 118 – 119) for Romanticism’s self-critical and protodeconstructive tendencies.  See Derrida (1995: 10 – 11, 14, 22– 23) for the concept of “consignation” and the archive’s formative power in a general sense; and Derrida (1980: 56 – 57, 61, 74, 81) for the power structures a genre may graft onto its objects.

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“the functions of unification, of identification, of classification” (Derrida 1995: 10). These basic operations also involve acts of consignation (i. e. “gathering together signs […] to coordinate a single corpus […] in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration”; Derrida 1995: 10) and the genre’s general structuring principles, such as “resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reason” (Derrida 1980: 81). In short, a genre performs a harmonising function insofar as various elements are embedded in a synchrony that reflects the genre’s received conventions and traditions. On a related note, a genre also constitutes a spatial site and/or an act of mapping inasmuch as it “is itself a sort of map, since the generic parameters help to establish the projected ‘world’ of the story” (Tally 2013: 55) Finally, paratextual elements¹⁰⁶ (such as titles, headings, prefaces, annotations etc.) can be added to this list as they may, by the same token, fulfil a classificatory and/or evaluating function with regard to the main text and its genre (e. g. Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan” which clearly locates it within the literary tradition of the fragment). At first glance, the use of genre in Romanticism might appear contradictory given the emphasis it places on creative imagination and its programmatic break with petrified structures and existing (neoclassical) aesthetic norms/forms. Nevertheless, critics have shown that far from being “a movement ‘beyond genre’” (Duff 2009: 201), British Romanticism is rather a highly self-reflexive appropriation of genre traditions and their creative modification at the same time (Duff 2009; Curran 1986). On this point, we can look to the ode as an example; reflecting the “contradictory impulses of Romanticism” (Duff 2009: 210), the ode was a means to explore the present from an ancient and mythological perspective, thereby fusing the archaic with the modern. Its formal structure, moreover, perfectly aligned with Romantics’ poetic concerns, such as the exploration of shifting emotions (via the ode’s “principle of rapid transition […] derived from the ode’s original association with dance”; Duff 2009: 208), metapoetical issues (which can be traced back to the self-reflexivity of the Pindaric ode) or “the skeptical spirit of the age” (Curran 1986: 84) which complies with the ode’s dialectical structure of strophe and antistrophe (Curran 1986: 28). This particular appropriation of genres coincides with the peculiarities of the historical period to which it belongs – a period that was profoundly marked by (temporal) fragmentation and a general sense of loss. The awareness of an uncertain and precarious present was not only, as previously explained, an outcome of manifold modernising processes but was also the result of “[Britain’s] cultural isolation […] during

 See Genette (1993: 11– 13) for the concept of paratext.

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the long years of warfare” (Curran 1986: 28). In addition, the preceding Age of Enlightenment was characterised by “the failure of myth, the factionalism and proliferation of religious sects, the dissolution of iconographical knowledge” (Curran 1986: 205); in short, a loss of “its past and all of its mythology” (Curran 1986: 205). As a result, Stuart Curran argues that British Romanticism is a “renaissance of the Renaissance” (Curran 1986: 211) insofar as these cultural changes led to a revival of the reformatory spirit of the English Renaissance, manifesting itself in re‐imaginings of past and present with traditional literary genres providing stable structures and repositories of cultural memory in order to compensate for this lack (Curran 1986: 28, 205 – 206). In accordance with the ethos of Romantic aesthetics, however, literary genres were adapted in a creative and organic way. Acting as both mirror and lamp, the Romantic movement is to be considered a self-reflexive recovery/appropriation of existing genres/traditions (e. g. the ode, the sonnet, the ballad or the romance) and their imaginative transformation at the same time – a process which perfectly reflects those dynamics at play in the aforementioned aesthetics of deconstruction and (re)creation (Duff 2009: VIII, 1– 6, 10 – 11, 14– 22, 139 – 140, 201 ff.; Curran 1986: 5, 13, 204– 209, 210 ff.). Against this backdrop, it can be concluded that Romantic uses of genres should be regarded in a twofold manner with respect to the concept of archive fever. First, a genre itself may act as a powerful archive by providing a specific structural-semantic framework into which the material can be inscribed; in so doing, however, a genre also imposes its own aesthetics and structural conventions on the archived material. Second, the (Romantic) appropriation of genres is simultaneously an archiving (and upholding) of their generic traditions. This establishes an instance of intertextuality – to be more precise, architextuality¹⁰⁷ – through which a given genre and its literary tradition are preserved/archived. On that note, certain similarities can be discerned from Harold Bloom’s thesis on the Anxiety of Influence, according to which the Romantic poets incorporate, destroy and originally recreate their predecessors until the copy becomes an original.¹⁰⁸ Whereas Bloom grounds this (de)constructive process in oedipal terms (i. e. the predecessor as an overwhelming father figure that the poet wants to defy) (Zapf 2008), I suggest that the ambivalence of Romantic genre memory is fundamentally based on the notion of archive fever. On the one hand, the use of tradi-

 See Genette (1993: 13 – 14).  Bloom describes this process with the help of six so-called “revisionary ratios”: supplementation of the original text via clinamen und tessera (Bloom 2007: 19 – 73); repression and destruction of the predecessors via kenosis and daemonization (Bloom 2007: 77– 112); the purging askesis (Bloom 2007: 115–136) and finally the reintegration of the precursors in the course of the apophrades (Bloom 2007: 139–155).

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tional genres corresponds to a fever to archive with respect to the sense of (mythical and temporal) loss that has been outlined. This archival fever manifests itself in a desire to possess the original in its totality (probably best expressed with the genre of the fragment, which refers to a totality and indicates its absence at the same time; Schmitt 2005: 13, 374) and to excavate its roots: “[t]o use a literary genre was to render perceptible the sediment layers, to build up across time, which constitute that genre; to renew […] the ‘archaic elements’ that lay buried within” (Duff 2009: 145). On the other hand, this act of archiving is highly ambivalent since it follows the archive’s paradoxical structure of storage and destruction. This is related to the fact that Romantic uses of genre constitute a dialectic process of archiving, destruction and subsequent (re)creation which, in combination, attest to both the archive’s destructive and creative facets and, not least, to the archived genre’s spectrality (i. e. being present and absent at the same time). Most striking, however, is how the (self‐)destructive features of genre memory can be ultimately traced back to the workings of the death drive, which equally haunts the archive and becomes apparent in modes of repetition. As Derrida argues in his essay “The Law of Genre”, it is precisely the (recurrent) act of citing/iterating a specific genre (1980: 57– 58), and thus also archiving it within a given (literary) text, which brings about a genre’s “impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence” (Derrida 1980: 57).¹⁰⁹ *** Within this framework, the manifestations of the death drive initially outlined should be completed with complementary perspectives on the language system, which constitutes the poem’s archive in its most basic sense. According to Derrida, the iterability of the linguistic sign – in a wider sense, repetition – constitutes the fundamental condition of communication and the linguistic system. However, the repetition of the sign, i. e. its various de- and recontextualisations, inevitably leads to a break with its former communicative and semantic contexts, hence undermining the opposition between original and copy since the former is derived as an idealisation of the latter (which, in turn, is semantically contaminated due to its foregoing repetitions). Through the sign’s (repeated) spatialisation and temporalisation it therefore effaces itself – an observation that Derrida aptly describes with his concept of différance (Derrida 2001b: 184; Derrida 2001a: 24– 29, 32, 34– 35, 40; Derrida 2005a: 278 – 299; Derrida 2016: 6 – 18; Derrida

 See also Kerler (2017: 143 – 144), in which I developed the central ideas of this paragraph.

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2005b: 332 – 339).¹¹⁰ In other words, “the death drive is inscribed in the linguistic system inasmuch as the latter is based on the logic of repetition that results in disintegration” ¹¹¹. The disintegrating power arising from the linguistic sign’s de- and recontextualisation extends to larger units as well, namely to the construction of various archives through related processes such as the gathering, classification and supplementation of its documents. Derrida’s text itself (i. e. his lecture, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which was originally held at the Freud Museum in London) comments on and re-evaluates Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses (1993), thereby demonstrating the archive’s instability through these processes of de- and recontextualisation. That is, Derrida grafts a new context onto Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses, which in its own right had already grafted a new context onto Sigmund Freud’s Der Mann Moses (1939), (both) thus modifying the pre-existing and official Freudian archive (Derrida 1995: 17– 18; 26 – 29, 45). Language, thus, is a medium that both archives and destroys, a spectral archive being both present and absent at the same time. In psychoanalytical terms we can, drawing on Udo Hock’s reading of Žižek, further remark that it is the symbol(ic order) which kills the object. This death, in turn, informs the subject’s (archival) desire, manifesting itself in symbolic and/or imaginary invocations of the object lost. The symbolic order, hence, is equally governed by the interplay of Eros and Thanatos, with the result that the object desired comes to inhabit a liminal position between conservation and destruction, presence and absence, fort and da (Hock 2000: 241– 245). These final observations not only add further nuance to the origins of the fever to archive but they also unveil the invocation of dead/lost objects via the construction and destruction – i. e. deconstruction as an aesthetic strategy (un)consciously employed by the author, for example, by playing with semantic polyvalence, deferred structures, instances of the fragmentary or by using genres like the fragment – of poetic archives as aesthetic re-enactments of the fort/da game; that is, acts of compulsive repetition that strive to return to or restore a previous state or, borrowing from the words of Derrida, such poetic archives become “thanatographical” (Derrida 1987: 377) as they discursively and aesthetically reproduce the motion of fort:da through the ongoing interplay of appropriation and deferral, the play of construction and destruction (Derrida 1987: 377). These observations on language as a primarily abstract archival system must eventually be extended to an analysis of its more tangible and material dimen-

 See also Kerler (2017: 131).  Kerler (2017: 131). I essentially follow Žižek’s reading of Lacan, for whom the death drive is also a significant part of the symbolic. See Žižek (1998: 131– 133) and Hook (2016).

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sions. There is – analogous to the Platonic dichotomy of mind and body – a long tradition of dividing language into the immaterial meaning of words and the rather non-signifying materiality of words.¹¹² Yet, contrary to the primacy afforded to the signified over the signifier (also in extension to the signifiers’ archiving medium) and to the immaterial over the material, language is fundamentally performed, negotiated and circulated through diverse material manifestations – an essential human condition that Jerome McGann identifies as the “textual condition” (McGann 1991: 3), i. e. an inherently material signifying practice.¹¹³ Language thus “matters all the time” (Bleich 2003: 469), both in a material sense and (materially) signifying condition. While Derrida (2001a: 24– 26) describes with his concept of the iterability of the sign language’s basic condition of creating meaning (and, in a related sense, thus also pointing at the materiality of the signifier), we can extend this idea to the iterability of the superordinate archiving medium. That is, language needs a physical, material substrate – an archive – that can be reproduced/iterated/circulated and thus can partake in the communicative process¹¹⁴ or, to put it into McGann’s words, language must be materially embodied (McGann 1991: 10). Similar to Derrida’s iterability of the sign, however, such an iterability – in a broader sense, repeated processes of material de- and recontextualisation – also brings about a significant degree of dissemination, i. e. the (self‐)destructive aspect of the archive.¹¹⁵ The immanent conflict between the singularity of the sign and its necessary iterability for the construction of meaning, which brings about its dissemination ipso facto, is hence likewise at the heart of the archive’s materiality. In other words, the grafting of its (material) structures onto the object and placing it in synchrony through processes of consignation, i. e. the repeated material mediation/technical iteration, contribute to the “trouble” of the archive: There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. (Derrida 1995: 14) I thus name the trouble, or what is called in English the “trouble,” of these visions and of these affairs in a French idiom which is again untranslatable, to recall at least that the ar-

 See Bleich (2006: 607– 611) for the body/mind dichotomy reflected in the separation of meaning/intention and words.  McGann (1991: 3, 16). See also Iwanicki (2003: 495 – 496) and Senchyne (2018: 73): “the material embodiment of texts [is] […] a crucial aspect of meaning making.”  See, in a related context, Walker (2013: 199 – 200, 231).  See, in a related context, McGann (1991: 6, 10, 182– 185) for the destructive aspect of the textual (material) condition.

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chive always holds a problem for translation. With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction. (Derrida 1995: 57)

As a last point, thus, the very materiality of language and its archiving medium must be taken into consideration. These aspects involve in particular: (a) the signifier(s) itself/themselves, comprising elements¹¹⁶ such as – – – –

graphemes, typography the signifiers’ arrangement and the (page) layout respectively; including footnotes, endnotes, headings etc. -> the paratext in general the suprasegmental level in a wider sense: genres and (formalised) aesthetics

And – in close and occasionally overlapping relation to the aforesaid – the materiality of the archiving medium of these signifiers (b), such as paper and its physical features (Walker 2013: 202; McGann 1991: 12– 13; Senchyne 2018: 75), ink, books, the fusion of image and text (as for instance in William Blake’s illuminated books), or, nowadays, digital media. Not least, the precarious materiality must be taken into account because “these things [the archived objects; D.K.] are not present, in another sense of the term. Colors will have faded. Paper will have creased or flaked away. Their untimeliness is marked in their diminished or tarnished materiality” (Kelley and Lynch 2018: 6). The materiality of any given text – i. e. its “texture”¹¹⁷ as manifested in “differentiable layers of materiality and mediality” (Reinfandt 2016: 319) – can consequently provide information on the nexus between the text, the reader and their cultural‐material contexts, between the immaterial and the material, between text/language as abstract (immaterial) system and its material (archiving) medium.¹¹⁸ Perceiving the poem as archive (i. e. the archival discourses, material practices and mediality it employs and refers to), hence, also sheds light on how it is embedded within the technological peculiarities of a given period’s (material) communication practices (Reinfandt 2016: 328 – 332). Conversely, “[t]o study texts and textualities, then, we have to study these complex (and open-ended) histories of textual change and  The following list draws on Walker (2013: 200) and McGann (1991: 12– 13, 180 – 181).  For the concept of “texture” as a critical approach to a text’s materiality, see Reinfandt (2016: 319 – 334).  Reinfandt (2016: 319 – 320). See, in a related context, also McGann (1991: 9 – 10, 185 – 186).

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variance” (McGann 1991: 9), i. e. the discourses, mediality and materiality of contemporary archives and archival practices.

III Spatial Archives: Mourning and Melancholia 1 Lost Spaces and Spaces of Loss: Wordsworth, Clare and Lord Byron One of the most profound changes of the 18th and early 19th century, and one that was especially felt by the Romantics, was the Enclosure movement. It was precisely during this time span (particularly 1760 – 1770, 1790 – 1814) when the parliamentary enclosures most enjoyed their heyday, responding to a “newly embraced capitalist mode of production” (Mason 2010: 27) while also constituting a reaction to the increased price of grain due to the French wars (Turner 2003: 194). As a result, the previous system and practice of open-field agriculture was abolished and many labourers were deprived of their customary rights. Former communal and open spaces became noncommunal, delimited by individual property rights and fell into the hands of a few landowners (Turner 2003: 193; Mason 2010: 29; Mingay 1990: 48 – 50). Although the social consequences of these developments have been regarded by some historians (e. g. Turner 2003: 194; Chambers 1953: 327; Snell 1985: 138 – 139) in a rather favourable light (such as being credited for paving the way for the Industrial Revolution due to the increase in production, or for securing employment), the negative effects are generally agreed upon (Snell 1985: 140, 144, 149, 186 – 188; Turner 2003: 195). For the majority of people, the Enclosure movement brought about a loss of their livestock, (communal) spaces and their associated (common) rights, resulting in poverty and estrangement (Snell 1985: 179 – 180, 194; Mason 2010: 23). Overall, it meant a “disruption to the way of life associated with the commons and open fields, and the loss of partial independence suffered by the poor” (Snell 1985: 194). Not least, these changes also had a decisive impact on the structures of rural society in that the sense of community was likewise shattered by introducing a capitalist ideology that emphasised individual property to the disadvantage of communal, seasonal work (Turner 2003: 195; Mason 2010: 9). *** In view of this spatial fragmentation and loss, (re‐)constructed spaces in many Romantic poems can be read as spatial archives that transcend mere representation by both articulating and (to a certain extent) sublimating the poets’ experi-

Note: Parts of this chapter (ch. III.1) were previously published by De Gruyter: Kerler, David. “Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats”. Anglia 138:3 (2020): 355 – 383. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-004

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ences of loss – a sublimation, however, that frequently verges on melancholia. This is especially true for John Clare, who particularly suffered from the processes outlined. He witnessed the increasing enclosure of his native village Helpston as well as of the surrounding parishes (Maxey, Etton, Ufford and Bayton) – a loss of spaces that was accompanied by a considerable loss in the sense of communal living (Bate 2003: 46 – 50; Lucas 1994: 165 – 166): Use of the commons was technically a right restricted to those who occupied certain properties, but psychologically the unenclosed spaces were perceived as belonging to everyone. Enclosure was therefore symbolic of the destruction of an ancient birthright based on cooperation and common rights. (Bate 2003: 49)

Beyond his traumatic move to Northborough at the age of 39, we can generally speak of Clare as a man who “was harrowed and stricken by personal and historical upheavals all the days of his life” (Heaney 1994: 138). This is reflected in his poetry by a melancholic depiction of space, constituting testimonies which indicate the “desperate longing of a lost man for something to cling onto in a crumbling world” (Storey 1974: 9). Within these sites of “memory and mourning” (Sandy 2013: 131), it is a “‘heartfelt grief’ [that] marks out Clare’s writing as a profound site of loss which, attuned to the effects of natural and social change, gauges the passage of time, lost youth, and the sweeping away of age-old agricultural practices and customs” (Sandy 2013: 132). In other words, and in a more general sense, spaces within the poems function as literary places of remembrance where this sense of loss can be projected and meditated upon. In so doing, the poems come to represent soothing counter models and material archives which the poets can resort to in order to relocate their lost objects. An example of this can be seen in John Clare’s “Sighing for Retirement” and “On Visiting a Favourite Place”, in which the silence of nature is juxtaposed to the noise of cities: O take me from the busy crowd, I cannot bear the noise! For Nature’s voice is never loud; I seek for quiet joys. (Clare 1984a: ll. 1– 4) Peace love& quiet every where & nought is changed since last I came […]

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A mind oer flowing with excess Of joys that spring from solitude That sees all nature spring to bless The heart away from noises rude (Clare 1998: ll. 18 – 19, 25 – 28)

A similar opposition is established by the “din / of towns and cities” (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 26 – 27) of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, where he contrasts the estranged spaces of towns and cities (and their implicit association with the industrialisation and the loss of natural spaces) on the one hand, with (the memory of) natural, unspoilt landscapes on the other hand: Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owned to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration […] […] when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! (Wordsworth 2000a: 23 – 31, 54– 57)

The Wye valley becomes Wordsworth’s “anchor of […] [his; D.K.] purest thoughts” (Wordsworth 2000a: l. 110), a place of remembrance in which his (idealised) memories (the “forms of beauty”; Wordsworth 2000a: l. 24) are stored (“passing even into my purer mind / With tranquil restoration”; Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 30 – 31), and which is ultimately archived in the course of the poem’s composition/spatial performance. John Clare’s poetry and his depictions of natural spaces have been traditionally read by critics as “an attempt to create out of his losses a permanence denied him in the present” (Storey 1974: 9), “that his poetry would bestow immortality not only on himself but also on his native place” (Bate 2003: 106). I suggest, in addition to this, that his urge to (spatially) preserve goes much deeper inasmuch as it is rooted in an archival fever that displays traces of a melancholic disposition. A first indication of this can be seen in nature’s association

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with silence in all these examples. These instances of silence coincide with the death drive’s regressive tendency, i. e. stasis and the reduction of inner stimulative tension, and unveil a (melancholic) archival fever behind these artistic depictions: the subject’s fever to return to the serenity of the absolute origin via the act of spatially archiving (i. e. figuratively returning to nature’s silence by re-constructing these places as spaces). This archival fever, the nostalgic desire to return to a lost (idealised) space, can be further laid bare with the help of Bakhtin’s concept of the so-called idyllic chronotope. As I have argued before, the idyllic chronotope constitutes a spatial archive of a lost naturalness in view of the numerous modernising processes that resulted in (a melancholic awareness of) spatio-temporal fragmentation and loss. One of its main features is that it suggests the presence of an original (organic) unity between humankind and nature (“To her fair works did nature link / The human soul that through me ran” as Wordsworth stresses in his “Lines Written in Early Spring”; 2000b ll. 5 – 6) that has been lost. Accordingly, the natural spaces in John Clare’s “On Visiting a Favourite Place” are put into a communal relationship with the lyrical I as the flowers’ personification (“Joy stoops for flowers that say rejoice / & shall such friendships cheer in vain”; Clare 1998: ll. 13 – 14) or the trees’ personification and metaphorical welcome suggest (“The trees their friendly arms extend / & bid me welcome to their shade”; Clare 1998: 35 – 36). The idyllic chronotope is furthermore characterised by its natural cycles, i. e. by the concurrence of life, death and renewal, overall connoting a timeless and original, unspoilt quality. In the case of John Clare, the notion of cycles is additionally relevant since they are associated with pre-enclosed open spaces in opposition to enclosed spaces which are linear (Bate 2003: 47– 48). Such natural cycles are stressed, for instance, in Clare’s “Eternity of Nature” (“There’s nothing mortal in them [woods fields, brooks]; their decay / Is the green life of change” Clare 1984b: ll. 4– 5) or by his reference to “pleasant Autumn […] [that; D.K.] turns them [brakes and fern] all to brown” (Clare 1984a: ll. 23 – 24) in “Sighing for Retirement”, both of them alluding to the cycles of life, death and renewal. In “On Visiting a Favourite Place”, the notion of (natural) cycles even constitutes a structuring device for the speaker’s spatial depiction (i. e. the mode of depiction can be qualified here as performative “tour” that contrasts with the static linearity of enclosed places): starting with the sky (Clare 1998: ll. 1– 10), the lyrical I next turns his attention to hills and flowers (Clare 1998: ll. 11– 28), moves up to the sun (Clare 1998: ll. 29 – 30), shifts his view back to earth by moving from flowers and trees down to molehills (Clare 1998: ll. 33 – 37), and eventually returns to the sky via the image of the rising sun by the end of the poem.

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These (re‐)constructions of natural spaces as idyllic chronotopes transcend the mere phenomenal as they additionally refer to an original state of being, a place of absolute commencement. This is implied, firstly, by the emphases placed on natural cycles and the organic relationship between humankind and nature, which combined, locate these spaces in an ideal(ised) realm of wholeness. Secondly, these spaces are, moreover, frequently attributed divine and eternal qualities, as can be seen for example in Clare’s “Eternity of Nature” (“Its [nature; D.K.] birth was heaven, eternal is its stay” Clare 1984b: l. 7) or in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” according to which there is “a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things” (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 101– 103). In the cases of Clare’s “On Visiting a Favourite Place” and “Sighing for Retirement”, the depicted landscapes are explicitly equated with edenic qualities (such as in “There is a breath—indeed there is / Of eden left—[…] / of something more then earthly bliss” [Clare 1998: ll. 1– 3] or in “A garden through the year” [Clare 1984a: l. 28], which alludes to the notion of a prelapsarian, eternal paradise) or even stress God’s presence (“GOD bade me make my dwelling there” [Clare 1984a: l. 11]; “Such scenes will make the mind divine / […] In such a mood Gods love be mine” [Clare 1998: 95, 97]). As Harold Bloom observes in this regard, Clare’s concerns resemble those of Wordsworth for “Clare’s desire was the desire of Wordsworth, to find the unfallen Eden in nature” (Bloom 1961: 437). Overall, these attributions show that the (re‐)construction of these places into spaces are deeply indebted to a desire not only to preserve the (experience of the) object in its originality and essence, but also to a desire to return to an original state via the act of (spatially) archiving, the physical object in the poem thus becoming an archival space for the experience of transcendence. Going beyond the Bakhtinian concept of the idyllic chronotope, this poetic return to the origin not only materialises in symbolic associations with the Christian notion of Eden, but may also reveal traces of a rather abstract (desire to) return to the inanimate/stasis as connoted by the abounding references to silence and cycles. This performativity of the (spatial) archive engenders a notable sense of presence within the object’s absence. John Clare’s re-visit of his “Favourite Place” suggests the presence of the original scene resulting in his “mind oer flowing with excess / Of joys” (Clare 1998: ll. 25 – 26) to such a degree that he feverishly tries to archive it through poetry: nought is changed since last I came Then can I help but be same With verses dancing on my tongue (Clare 1998: 19 – 21)

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Clare’s re-visit, hence, should also be understood in a figurative and metapoetic sense respectively, i. e. as a re-visit by writing/enacting the poem itself, thereby evoking the spatially archived (absent) object (“I felt from all the world away / […] A power divine seemed every where”; Clare 1998: 71, 72). In a similar manner, the idealised spaces depicted in “Sighing for Retirement” convey in their poetic archive an original and unspoilt quality by being “[a] garden through the year” (Clare 1984a: l. 28) as the lyrical I concludes. In both cases we can say, drawing on Derrida and de Certeau, that the literary archived spaces also become places that the poet actualises (as spaces) in the performativity of their re-enactment (i. e. reading and writing), providing “an irreducible experience of the future” (Derrida 1995: 45), albeit a spectral return of the lost object. For these instances of presence must also be observed against the backdrop of an omnipresent, melancholic awareness of loss: behind these idyllic chronotopes, the spatially archived “garden through the year” (Clare 1984a: l. 28), still lies the “desert waste and drear” (Clare 1984a: 26), a wasteland that critics have interpreted as “post‐enclosure landscape” (Howard 1981: 185) and that metaphorically points at the melancholic’s feelings of emptiness and loss in view of the object’s absence. Alike, the image of a remaining breath of eden at the very beginning of “On Visiting a Favourite Place” implies transitoriness and the imminent loss of the object – an idealised, edenic space whose ultimate presence can only be located in the realm of potentiality, as a future prospect, by the poem’s end: “But hope & joy of such a friend / […] How rich that rising sun will be” (Clare 1998: ll. 105, 110). Being neither spirit nor flesh, the lost object returns within these spatial archives only as a spectral memory of a possible future that haunts the archiving subject. *** (Imagined) spaces function not only as archives of lost spaces/places but also as archives of lost time. Especially in the light of the concept of the chronotope, with its characteristic fusion of time and space, we can further differentiate between spatial archives that emphasise temporal loss, on the one hand, and those that emphasise the archiving subject’s anxiety about future (temporal) loss, on the other hand. The former shall be exemplified with the help of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and “There was a Boy”, whose (re‐)constructions of spaces are both rooted in and structured by a profound sense of temporal loss. Whereas the latter begins with the eponymous stress on the boy’s absence (“There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs / And Islands of Winander!” Wordsworth 1992 f: ll. 1– 2), which is spatially associated through the juxtaposition of the churchyard and the village school by the poem’s end, “Tintern Abbey” addresses the

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temporal difference between his present and former visit of the Wye valley directly (“Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!”; Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 1– 2). The exclamatory opening of the poem, which is further highlighted by its tautological complementation, is a first sign of the speaker’s feverish anxiety of temporal loss, i. e. “of time lost, of the self and its continuities lost, of the worth of life itself lost amongst unseasonable and unnatural rhythms” (Turner 1986: 156). Accordingly, the spaces of “Tintern Abbey” not only function, as has been argued before, as places of remembrance (idyllic chronotopes) that stand in contrast to urban estrangement, i. e. as archives of spatial loss, but they also constitute spatial archives of temporal loss. This can be seen, in particular, in the poem’s fourth section where the lyrical I establishes an explicit connection between the natural spaces he perceives and his former self/youth: With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: […] I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasure of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all. […] (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 60 – 63, 68 – 76)

The speaker identifies his “boyish days” (Wordsworth 2000a: l. 74) and “thoughtless youth” (Wordsworth 2000a: l. 91) through an intimate relationship with nature as can be observed in his identification with a roe via the simile in line 68, therefore, making him an integral part of nature. Similarly in “There was a Boy”, the personified cliffs and islands of Winander “knew” (Wordsworth 1992 f: l. 1) the boy, who also communicated with the owls by mimicking their sounds. Ultimately, this period of time/youth is not only characterised by the boy’s organic relationship with nature, but also by his immediate response to it: […] the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

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Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest, Unborrowed from the eye. – That time is past (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 78 – 84)

What Wordsworth mourns in this passage of “Tintern Abbey” is his own lost time, a former phase of the self, in which he experienced (the object/nature in its) totality (Bloom 1961: 129, 135 – 136) beyond any distorting frames (i. e. not being by “thought supplied”; Wordsworth 2000a: l. 83). The (images of the) mountain and the deep wood serve in this context as chronotopes where his (recollected/reconstructed) past experiences of totality and transcendence can be stored (their “forms” [Wordsworth 2000a: l. 80] together with the previous reference to the “forms of beauty” [Wordsworth 2000a: l. 24) alluding in this context to the Platonic eidos and the speaker’s mental state of “see[ing] into the life of things” [Wordsworth 2000a: l. 49]). Such a sense of presence is similarly a determinant for “There was a Boy”: Then, sometimes, in that silence […] […] a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene Would enter unaware into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receiv’d Into the bosom of the steady lake. (Wordsworth 1992 f: ll. 18 – 25)

As soon as the boy ceases to “mimic” the sounds of nature, the silence of the sublime scene (which is, similarly to “Tintern Abbey”, spatially identified with rocks and woods) enters into his innermost self, creating the object’s presence within the subject. In other words, the boy experiences the object in its totality beyond any mediating frames of reference (i. e. beyond its representation via sounds/language/poetry) and rather in its representational absence, as indicated by the notion of silence. This concurrence of subject and (lost) object is spatially expressed by the personified “bosom of the steady lake” which is, in turn, equated with the boy’s consciousness;¹¹⁹ spatial archive, archiving subject and the  “The scene passes into the boy’s mind and becomes the geography of his imagination” (Turner 1986: 169).

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archived object thereby constitute a unity. By (re‐)constructing these spaces, Wordsworth not only strives to recover this temporal loss, but also endeavours to archive the experience of presence manifested in the wholesomeness of the natural scene in order to synthesise¹²⁰ his past self with his present self out of a superordinate position. The boy’s “feverish and restless anxiety […] for the recurrence of the riotous sounds which he had previously excited” (Wordsworth 1974a: footnote to l. 344), as Wordsworth writes in an explanatory footnote in his “Preface to the Edition of 1815”, is thus consistent with the poet’s anxious and feverish desire to (spatially) archive his lost past self within the objects mentioned. Notwithstanding these rather sublimatory instances of spatial mourning, the desire to spatially archive the uniqueness/singularity of these experiences and responses to nature can be also traced back to a more fundamental (temporal) loss that unveils a further decisive aspect regarding the archiving subject’s melancholic disposition: the loss of the mother. As Leon Waldoff notes with regard to “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth’s early and traumatic loss of his mother manifests itself in his attachment to nature (2001: 47),¹²¹ constituting “a maternally figured presence for the earlier sense of emptiness, weariness, and meaninglessness experienced in a state of separation and absence” (Waldoff 2001: 71). The described desire for an organic and immediate experience of nature, hence, may also reveal traces of the loss of his mother and, as I shall argue following Julia Kristeva, indicate an inability to detach from the lost object (a denial of negation). In this regard, it is crucial that Wordsworth stresses the affective aspect of his poetry, i. e. the “emotion recollected” (Wordsworth 2006a: 1506) which he experienced throughout the course of his organic and immediate relationship with nature.¹²² This implies an attempt at reconstructing the former mother-child dyad on an affective level through a semiotisation of the symbolic (here in the re-construction and re-experience of sublime nature); the mother-child dyad being a phase which is similarly characterised by a singularity of subject and object or, in other words, by their organic and immediate relation. Time, space and

 See Waldoff (2001: 51, 64– 66, 68), who stresses the splitting of the “I” in the poem and the process of self-transformation via self-representation. See, in this regard, also Hess (2008: 301– 303).  See also Stelzig (1985: 145) and Mason (2010: 56): “The early deaths of his mother and father certainly haunt Wordsworth’s poetry, as his narrators search for substitute guardians in nature and the divine.”  See, in a related context, Hess (2008: 286): “Wordsworth’s poetry is [not] photographic in terms of its visual description […] but rather in terms of the subjectivity and structures of experience that it constructs.”

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representation thus converge in these spatial archives towards a zero point which is aesthetically approximated, in its ultimate consequence, by notions of silence and stasis. The latter can be related to the workings of the death drive, i. e. the drive to return to an original/inanimate state and to reduce inner stimulative tension, which underlies the melancholic’s inability to detach from the lost object (or the Kristevian Thing) and seems to emerge through the said textual structures. Such instances of stasis can be seen, for example, in the aforementioned climax of “There was a Boy”, which culminates precisely in a literal moment of silence that is spatially mirrored by the “steady lake” (Wordsworth 1992 f: l. 25), and in the overall rhythm of “Tintern Abbey”. This is observable in how the latter is characterised by numerous forms of repetition (including the poem’s overarching theme of revisit/reconstruction/re-enactment) and soothing run-on lines, which rhythmically mirror the spatiotemporal return to the (affective tranquillity of the) origin through a general dissolution of tension. Geoffrey Hartman describes the poem’s peculiar rhythm as “a wave effect of rhythm whose characteristic is that while there is internal acceleration, the feeling of climax is avoided. […] We can rarely tell, in fact, whether the ‘wave’ is rising or falling” (1971: 26). Wordsworth’s most intense conjunction of natural space, the loss of the mother and the death drive, however, can be seen in “Nutting”, which shall be analysed in a more detailed fashion at a later point, giving special focus to the sublime. Nevertheless, for the time being it suffices to note that these spatial archives are characterised by a simultaneous presence and absence of the (lost) object, oscillating between spatial mourning and melancholia. This is especially evident in the insuperable temporal difference inscribed in these archives: In the very process of spatially evoking (and poetically fixing) his lost time via natural objects, the speaker/the poet has to acknowledge “[t]hat [this] time is past” (Wordsworth 2000a: l. 84), that he “cannot paint / What then [he] was” (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 76 – 77). His re-collections of his lost youth through the (re‐)construction of these spatial archives are consequently only “gleams of half-extinguish’d thought, / With many recognitions dim and faint” (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 59 – 60). The former experiences of transcendence are, therefore, solely present in their absence,¹²³ i. e. in highly transient instances as suggested by the

 As Mark Sandy argues in a more general context, “Wordsworth’s pastoral elegies, in their effort to recapture a specific time, place, and individual, are about the unreliability – not the recovery – of memory” (2013: 44). See also Stelzig, who argues that “Wordsworth’s autobiographical construction of the self involves the assertion of a poetics of presence called into question by an equally powerful pressure of absence, the nightmare of a faltering self burdened by the loss of its voice and a coherent sense of its proper identity” (1985: 142).

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image of fleeting “gleams”. This spectrality can also be related to the poem’s temporal structure inasmuch as it constantly oscillates between present tense and past tense, between the object’s presence due to its temporal (and melancholic) incorporation and its simultaneous absence. In other words, to the same extent that these temporal markers blend into each other, the object is simultaneously present and absent in its (spatial) archive. This temporal difference is also characteristic for “There was a Boy”, whose second part stresses the boy’s absence via the chronotope of churchyard and grave: Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot, The vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangs Upon a slope above the village school, And there along that bank when I have pass’d At evening, I believe, that near his grave A full half-hour together I have stood Mute – for he died when he was ten years old. (Wordsworth 1992 f: ll. 26 – 31)

Again, this spatial archive suggests the object’s presence within its absence: while the image of the churchyard envisions the boy’s death at the age of ten (a passage that most commentators interpret allegorically as the loss/death of Wordsworth’s own childhood; see for example Corn 1999: 367), he still lives on as a spectre within this place of remembrance (and haunts the speaker’s subjectivity) as the poem’s first part and its repetition in the second part (note the speaker’s re‐enactment of the moment of silence in the final lines)¹²⁴ suggest. Overall, these spatial archives can be said to originate from an archival fever resulting from the experience of lost time – i. e. in a desire to re‐create the (experience of the) object in its originality and, in so doing, to return to a place of absolute beginnings – while also being marked by a profound liminality. As Derrida observes in a more general though related context, the archive […] will never be memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. (Derrida 1995: 14)

Describing a threshold between memory and forgetting, the lost time’s presence and absence, between mourning and melancholia, the various (spatial) archives in the analysed examples are likewise constituted within their own structural  See Turner (1986: 169) for the parallels between the poem’s two parts.

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breakdown – a concurrence of re- and deconstruction of the (lost) object, which crucially underlies the poems’ melancholic mood. Despite this melancholic awareness of loss, the liminality of remembering and forgetting (of archiving and destroying) within these spatial archives nonetheless provides a substantial and creative potential for Wordsworth as he explicates in his address to his sister, Dorothy, in the final section of “Tintern Abbey”: […] and in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies! (Wordsworth 2000a: ll. 138 – 143)

Wordsworth re-evaluates here the loss of the singularity of his former experiences and emotions (in a more general sense: the loss of time) by indicating how the dialectics of memory, forgetting and temporality can lead to a higher synthesis of the archived material (not least, resulting in the present poem itself). The literary space is transformed into a place and vice versa in the course of its reimagination. In his metapoetical discussion of this ambivalent process of storage and effacement – a process that substantially underlies the ambivalent structure of the two poems discussed – Wordsworth tellingly uses the spatial metaphor of “a mansion” (Wordsworth 2000a: l. 141), whose etymological and material relations to the notion of the archive are, as has been shown, not the only similarities. *** Opposed to this experience of actual (temporal) loss, the fever to archive and the related constructions of various (spatial) archives can also originate from an anxiety about future (temporal) loss. That is, the threat of temporality’s “radical finitude” (Derrida 1995: 19, see also 59) and of imminent oblivion result in a feverish archival desire to preserve the object in its totality and originality. Time and space are thereby fused to spatial archives that are pervaded by a melancholic awareness of future loss. As previously noted, this archival anxiety is to be considered especially against the background of its socio-historical and cultural context. It is most notably the late 18th and early 19th century during which decisive socio-historical events had taken place (first and foremost the French Revolution) and the various impacts of previous modernising processes (such as the Industrial Revolution, enclosures or the proliferation of the sciences)

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were particularly experienced and felt. As Reinhart Koselleck argues in a more general context, the French Revolution together with politico-social and scientific‐technological progress caused a “rupture of continuity” (2004: 268) around the late 18th/early 19th century, which he conceives as a profound difference between experience and expectation, ultimately leading to an increased awareness of acceleration (2004: 268 – 270). Within the context of the previously outlined Enclosure Movement, therefore, the loss of space can be equally linked to the loss of (future) time as manifested in the experience of acceleration. Not least, this general awareness of acceleration and temporality, i. e. of the imminent loss of (future) time, also ties in with a growing fascination in the past and its theoretical reflection within the scientific field of historiography, further nourishing the notion that the subject is primarily a temporal being. Such an awareness of temporality and future loss (of time) is decisive for John Clare’s depiction of spaces in “Clifford Hill”, showing that (lost) spaces and time are closely intertwined. The poem was written in the asylum in Northampton – a period in Clare’s life, in which he had already experienced several (spatial) losses. A flowing river and the repetitive movement of a mill wheel constitute the poem’s central spatial metaphors that describe the unstoppable flow of time: The river rambles like a snake Along the meadow green And loud the noise of the mill wheels make […] And there as swift the waters pass So runs the life of man (Clare: 1984c: ll. 1– 6)

At first glance, the depicted scene over the course of the poem acts as a spatial archive for an idealised naturalness, suggesting a strong sense of presence. This is achieved through various paradisiacal allusions, such as by references to the colour green (ll. 7 and 13), the landscape’s beauty as indicated by the summer’s season with its “beautious flowers” (Clare 1984c: l. 20), and not least by abundant references to bright colours and sunlight (e. g. “The sun gilt waves so bright” or “the sunny golden light” [Clare 1984c: ll. 14, 24]) alluding to the presence of the divine. The association of (open) spaces with the divine are characteristic of Clare’s oeuvre since, as Timothy Brownlow argues in a related context, “[t]he unenclosed landscape was Paradise for Clare, thus reversing the original meaning of Paradise, a word from the Persian meaning ‘a walled enclosure’” (1983: 68). However, the flowing river (to which the speaker refers in every stanza

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except the final one, thus figuratively “flowing” through the poem) reminds the speaker of the scene’s and his own transitoriness: “I smile, and yet my heart will greive / To see the waters flow” (Clare 1984c: ll. 11– 12). Together with the comparison of the river to a snake (see the simile in the poem’s beginning “The river rambles like a snake” [Clare 1984c: l. 1]), the imminent loss of this idealised, paradisaic space is furthermore explicitly placed within a religious context.¹²⁵ Despite the object’s presence, hence, a melancholic mood arises from the speaker’s anxiety about future loss, kindling an archival fever to spatially enshrine this moment within the present poem. As a result, the object inhabits a liminal space between its actual presence within the spatial archive and the threat of its future loss (spatially epitomised by the flowing river, representing the unstoppable flow of time and its destructive effects). In short, (the anxiety about) lost time and (lost) spaces are fused in a unity within the spatial archive. A further paradigmatic example of the archival fever arising from anxieties surrounding future (temporal) loss can be found in Lord Byron’s elegiac “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” from his volume Hours of Idleness (1807), which, together with “A Fragment” and “Elegy on Newstead Abbey”, represents Byron’s early reflections on his inherited estate. Whereas the anxiety of temporal loss in Clare’s “Clifford Hill” is closely connected to the (impending) loss of spaces (especially within the context of the Enclosure Movement), the ruinous abbey first and foremost epitomises Byron’s fear of falling into oblivion. On the one hand, Newstead Abbey acts as a spatial archive in a very literal sense, corresponding with Derrida’s note that the concept of the archive etymologically derives from an actual physical building, a house (arkheion) (Derrida 1995: 9). In fact, Byron was fascinated by “the sense at Newstead of the layerings of history, the way these buildings offered an entry to the past” (MacCarthy 2002: 15). Accordingly, he enriches the spaces of his estate with (partly idealised) memories of his ancestors: Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle; Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay; In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle Have choked up the rose which late bloom’d in the way. Of the mail-cover’d Barons, who proudly to battle Led their vassals from Europe to Palestine’s plain, The escutcheon and shield, which with every blast rattle, Are the only sad vestiges now that remain.

 See Howard (1981: 184– 185) for recurrent uses of religious symbols and the notion of (a lost) paradise in John Clare’s poetry.

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No more doth old Robert, with harp-stringing numbers, Raise a flame in the breast for the war-laurell’d wreath; Near Askalon’s towers, John of Horistan slumbers, Unnerved is the hand of his minstrel by death. Paul and Hubert, too, sleep in the valley of Cressy; For the safety of Edward and England they fell: My fathers! the tears of your country redress ye; How you fought, how you died, still her annals can tell. On Marston, with Rupert, ’gainst traitors contending, Four brothers enrich’d with their blood the bleak field; For the rights of a monarch their country defending, Till death their attachment to royalty seal’d. (Byron 1980a: ll. 1– 20)

Whereas “the hemlock and thistle” of Newstead’s “once smiling garden […] / [which] [h]ave choak’d up the rose, which late bloom’d in the way” (Byron 1980a: ll. 3, 4), symbolically refer to Byron’s Scottish mother and English father respectively,¹²⁶ the fourth and fifth stanza allude to his ancestors fighting in the Battle of Marston Moor and in the Hundred Years War (Blackstone 1975: 26; Shilstone 1988: 9). In the second stanza, Byron even traces the “escutcheon and shield”, which now only serve as decorative relics, back to “the mail-cover’d Barons, who […] / [l]ed their vassals from Europe to Palestine’s plain” (Byron 1980a: ll. 7, 5 – 6). This genealogical identification with the crusaders, however, is not biographically ascertained (Blackstone 1975: 23) but rather corresponds to Byron’s biographical archival fever to (re‐)construct idealised, heroic (MacCarthy 2002: 18) origins and, in doing so, to supplement his own genealogical archive: notwithstanding the dubious nature of his ancestry (such as his eccentric mother or his rakish and profligate father ‘Mad Jack’),¹²⁷ Byron savoured his nobility (Shilstone 1988: 8 – 9) and, “[w]ithout being over-attentive to detail, […] in the ancientness of this [his; D.K.] history” (MacCarthy 2002: 13). Against this backdrop, Newstead Abbey hence constitutes a place of remembrance for his (idealised) genealogy and furthermore serves, within the act of its poetic evocation (especially in the context of his Hours of Idleness and its publication), as a spatial metaphor for his quest towards achieving self‐definition (Shilstone 1988: 3, 18; Rowse 1978:  Blackstone (1975: 21): “English roses are ousted by Scots thistles: the Byrons by the Gordons in the poisonous shape (hemlock) of the poet’s mother.”  See Quennell (1974: 19) and Blackstone (1975: 21) for these and more examples of his “shortlived, disastrous, dissolute family” (Quennell: 19).

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154) – a search for (biographical) origins and (lost) ideals via the act of collecting and archiving, which, as I will argue in the following chapter, also structures Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in a decisive manner. On the other hand, Newstead Abbey and its poetic depiction are manifestations of a profound archival fever in the light of a threatening future loss of the aforementioned memory. This threat is closely connected to temporality as the intertextual reference to James Macpherson’s Ossian already indicates: Why dost thou build the hall, Son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy tower to-day, yet a few years, and the blast of the desart comes: it howls in thy empty court. (James Machpherson, Ossian qtd. in Byron 1980a: 35)

In this passage, Macpherson links the destructive effects of temporality (i. e. the loss of time) with decaying spaces (“the blast of the desart”) and the loss of power as suggested by the “empty court”. Similar to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, such a loss of power and authority is also closely connected to the loss of memory inasmuch as the “empty court” implies that his power will eventually be forgotten. Observed through the critical lens of archive fever, this intertextual reference functions as an impression on the archive(d material), resembling the Derridean concept of exergue: To cite before beginning is to give key through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage. In other words, the exergue consists in capitalizing on an ellipsis. […] An exergue serves to stock in anticipation and to prearchive a lexicon which, from there on, ought to lay down the law and give the order […] In this way, the exergue has at once an institutive and conservative function: the violence of a power (Gewalt) which at once posits and conserves the law, as the Benjamin of Zur Kritik der Gewalt would say. What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence. (Derrida 1995: 12)

The Ossianic epigraph in the poem’s paratext performs a classificatory and evaluative (or, in Derrida’s words, “nomological” [1995: 9]) function in that it grafts the intertextual context on the subsequent poem (and the spatial archive it constructs). Accordingly, Byron’s ruinous estate is also an epitome of the loss of time/memory and, in its poetic depiction, not least a materialisation of the poet’s archival anxiety: Macpherson’s howling “blast of the desart” is echoed by the “hollow winds [that] whistle” (Byron 1980a: l. 1) through Newstead’s battlements; and the “once smiling garden” (Byron 1980a: l. 3) is strewn with weeds, overall connoting notions of decay and loss. Notwithstanding

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Byron’s aforementioned evocation of his (partly idealised) ancestry, a strong sense (or, to be more precise, anxiety) of absence hence pervades the poem – a sense of absence that also materialises in the spectrality of various collectables. Starting with the shield and escutcheon as the only remaining “sad vestiges” of the “mail-cover’d barons” (Byron 1980a: ll. 8, 5) (i. e. objects that point in the presence of their materiality to their absence at the same time) through to the “[s]hades of heroes” (Byron 1980a: l. 21), his anxiety about a loss in memory is eventually condensed in the final lines: That fame, and that memory, still will he cherish: […] Like you will he live, or like you will he perish; When decay’d, may he mingle his dust with your own! (Byron 1980a: ll. 29 – 32)

In the light of the previously mentioned, this passage expresses a certain fatalism regarding Byron’s notorious ancestry and genetic heritage (a pose that will become famous in the character of the so-called ‘byronic hero’), however, it also unveils his archival anxiety; that is, his fear of falling into oblivion as spatially figured and conveyed through his decaying estate and the equally decaying memory of his ancestors. Consequently, the whole poem can be read as a result from his fever to archive: Newstead Abbey as an actual material, physical place of remembrance is archived as an imagined and aestheticised space within the poem, a vision of a “ruined repository of a vanished culture” (MacCarthy 2002: 20). Byron assumes here the role of the absent bard (“No more doth old Robert, with harp-stringing numbers, / Raise a flame, in the breast, for the war-laurell’d wreath” [Byron 1980a: ll. 9 – 10]) in order to provide the decaying abbey (and the equally decaying memory of his ancestors) permanence within the realm of art, namely via its (re‐)construction as a (poetic) spatial archive. Beyond being merely a poem about an actual farewell, “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” is also governed by Byron’s wish to (re‐)construct and become a part of the archive itself: his wish to “mingle his dust with your own” (Byron 1980a: l. 32) may imply a (latently deferred) variation of the melancholic compulsion to incorporate the absent object (i. e. the threatening loss of the memory of his partly idealised heritage as manifested in the poetic image and physical reality of the ruin¹²⁸). In this regard, it is quite telling that Byron, when first visiting Newstead in 1798, “had planted an oak, and nourished the fancy that, as the tree  For the ruinous condition of Byron’s estate, see, for example, Quennell (1974: 30 – 31) and MacCarthy (2002: 15 – 17).

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prospered or not, so would it be with him” (Rowse 1978: 158). Put differently, Byron’s poetic desire to become part of the/his archive was preceded by an actual physical act to inscribe himself into the materiality of this place of remembrance. Nine years later, he addresses this very oak in “To an Oak in the Garden of Newstead Abbey” (1807), thereby echoing the aforementioned concerns that structure “On Leaving Newstead Abbey”: Young Oak! when I planted thee deep in the ground, I hoped that thy days would be longer than mine; That thy dark‑waving branches would flourish around, And ivy thy trunk with its mantle entwine. Such, such was my hope, when in infancy’s years, On the land of my fathers I rear’d thee with pride; They are past, and I water thy stem with my tears, Thy decay not the weeds that surround thee can hide. I left thee, my Oak, and, since that fatal hour, A stranger has dwelt in the hall of my sire; Till manhood shall crown me, not mine is the power, But his, whose neglect may have bade thee expire. […] Oh! yet, if maturity’s years may be thine, Though I shall lie low in the cavern of death, On thy leaves yet the day‑beam of ages may shine, Uninjured by time, or the rude winter’s breath. For centuries still may thy boughs lightly wave O’er the corse of thy lord in thy canopy laid; While the branches thus gratefully shelter his grave, The chief who survives may recline in thy shade. And as he, with his boys, shall revisit this spot, He will tell them in whispers more softly to tread. Oh! surely, by these I shall ne’er be forgot; Remembrance still hallows the dust of the dead. And here, will they say, when in life’s glowing prime, Perhaps he has pour’d forth his young simple lay, And here must he sleep, till the moments of time Are lost in the hours of Eternity’s day. (Byron 1980b)

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Byron’s anxiety about passing into oblivion is combined with the general sense of anxiety he feels that the reading public will not recognise his genius. By (re‐)constructing these spatial archives (here: Newstead Abbey), he strives to both preserve and enrich the archive of the Byrons, not least via the intertextual inclusion of the mythological character Ossian. In this context, acting as poetic archon – (re‐)writing the archive (and publishing it) – represents a performative act of self‐fashioning, the construction and modification of his own public archive. This is a discursive strategy that he perfected while composing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in which the author, the narrator, Harold, and his public persona merge in substantial and significant ways.

2 The Archive and the Motif of Journey “The world is all before me” Byron, Letter to his Mother; June 22., 1809 “Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.” Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ll. 582 – 585

In the course of the Empire’s expansion, late 18th and early 19th century society came to be particularly characterised by an increasing tendency (and desire) to travel. Alongside explorers and colonists, it was most prominently young aristocrats who undertook a so-called ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, considered to serve an educational purpose as well as to contribute to the youth’s maturing (Moore and Strachan 2010: 27– 29). Amid this general seeking out remote places and their appropriation in various ways, ancient Greece was rediscovered through an outright fever to archive; archaeological expeditions with their excavations of artefacts and sculptures provided contemporary historical scholarship with an unprecedented material sense of the past’s presence. These antiquities were then archived in various ways, such as in museums but also indirectly as part of a “Greek Revival” (Jarvis 2004: 158) in contemporary “architecture; […] sculpture, furniture, dress, painting” (Jarvis 2004: 158) or in encyclopaedias of Greek

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mythology.¹²⁹ Finally, it is literature which plays a crucial role in reflecting and negotiating these tendencies, thereby becoming itself an archive of these journeys/collectables and revealing a great deal about the underlying archival processes. This is especially true for the Romantics, who not only were themselves keen travellers (e. g. Byron’s famous Grand Tour, Wordsworth’s peregrinations or the Shelley circle in the Alps) but who also fictionalised their experiences in a unique way. In contrast to 18th century travelogues, which were primarily descriptive, Romantic travel narratives are more concerned with introspection and the traveller’s subjectivity, thereby often unveiling a deep-rooted nostalgia and a yearning for the unknown (transcendental/divine). That is, their depictions of, and movements through, various spaces are representations and/or discursive constructions of the self, rendering the geographical journey and inner (psychological) journey two sides of the same coin (Büchel 2007: 72– 73; Daemmrich and Daemmrich 1995: 372– 374; Bode 2009). In the following section, I shall take a closer look at two poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and George Gordon Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in which the nexus between the motif of journey and the notion of archive fever will be made apparent. It will be argued that the different journeys described in these poems also delineate a movement through their (poetic and spatial) archive(s), throughout the course of which the narrating subject’s melancholic disposition, its fever to archive and the archive’s self-destructive tendencies will come into picture.

2.1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Though sharing various characteristic traits with the motif of journey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” nonetheless modifies its most important structural element; contrary to the motif ’s basal focus on a specific telos, i. e. its educational function that may lead to self-knowledge and/or a deeper knowledge of the world by the end of the journey,¹³⁰ the ancient mariner does not achieve any redemption nor deeper insight into his psychological state. For his alleged redemption according to a Christian teleology of sin and expiation, observed by many of the poem’s commentators,¹³¹ is deemed highly

 Jarvis (2004: 155 – 160). As Jarvis further shows, a similar yearning for the remote past could also be seen in the growing interest in ancient Britain and the Middle Ages (2004: 165 – 171).  See Daemmrich and Daemmrich (1995: 140 – 145, 308 – 310) for a comprehensive overview of the motif’s central characteristics.  See, for example, Blades (2004: 202): “After all the suffering, anguish and recrimination, the Mariner redeems himself by sanctifying all of the creatures.”; Benziger (1962: 26): “Coleridge

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ambiguous¹³² and questionable. His journey – both in a geographical and allegorical/psychological sense – emerges as a vicious circle that is profoundly determined by a logic pertaining to a deep-rooted archival fever. To be more precise, the ancient mariner’s journey – on a meta-level, the tale that he is doomed to re-tell eternally – is an expression of his melancholic fever to archive as well as a movement through the (spatial) archives he constructs within the very act(s) of narration. Moreover, the mariner’s (feverish) re-telling of his tale is – in a sense – redoubled in the numerous revisions of the poem, which were published over a long period of time (Eilenberg 1999: 291– 292). As Jack Stillinger meticulously shows, there are at least 18 different versions. Later versions (the last edition published during Coleridge’s lifetime was in 1834) differ from its original publication in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads insofar as a brief introductory summary (“The Argument”) was removed along with several of the poem’s lines, more archaic language was modernised, and a Latin epigraph as well as various glosses were added to the text. These glosses, added some 15 years after its original publication and comprising various religious explanations of the tale, constitute the major alterations to the poem as they provide a significant semantic impact on the text (Stillinger 1992: 127– 130, 134, 145). As will be furthermore argued, the notion of archive fever in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, therefore, also extends to the materiality of the poem, in particular to the textual annotations spatially located in the margins of the document, overall complementing/mirroring the mariner’s archive fever. The poem’s narrative structure provides a first indication of the mariner’s fever to archive. His tale is embedded within a framing narrative in which he meets a man on his way to a wedding-feast with whom he shares his story. Most striking, the mariner is frequently described by his “glittering eye” (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 3, 13) and the epithet “bright-eyed” (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 20, 40) in this opening section, suggesting an excessiveness (or rather obsession) in view of his upcoming narrative, namely the compulsive desire to tell his tale. This be-

believed in his heart that a supernatural grace penetrates the world to save the sinner and guard the innocent, and he told his frankly miraculous tales of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel to ‘realize’ this penetration in poetic terms.”; or Dilworth (2007: 523).  See, in this regard, also Eilenberg (1999: 298 – 299) and Stokes (2011: 91): “The poem turns upon itself, and we find that the narrative that we have overheard – which is rationalised in Christian readings as describing a man who comes to knowledge through suffering – is the continuance of that very suffering. Thus ends – or rather fails to end – the Mariner’s tale: not with an absolved and reconciled Christian, but with a deeply ambiguous character, potentially possessing daemonic characteristics.”

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comes especially clear by the poem’s ending, where he still is identified as “[t]he Mariner, whose eye is bright” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 618) and as he addresses this burning desire directly: Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns. (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 582– 585)

Seen from the poem’s beginning, however, such a redeeming act of narration is short-lived for the very poem is the result of his burning, “woful agony” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 579), hence excluding the possibility of any redemption and rather ending in a circular structure. In other words, the beginning and ending coincide with each other in this poem since retrospection constitutes its own precondition; far from being a redemptive journey (and, from a superordinate perspective, a redemptive tale), by the poem’s end the mariner is still affected by a burning compulsion to continually re-tell his story and, in so doing, (re‐)creates the precondition for his feverish desire. Within the act of story‐telling, i. e. in the course of his imaginative journey through various places, the mariner seems to be in search of something, an object that he has lost and which he tries to archive/possess. Characteristically, this act of seeking goes hand in hand with a fundamental melancholic disposition as suggested, for instance, by his physical appearance¹³³ and the poem’s circular structure, with the latter aligning with the melancholic’s excessive, narcissistic fixation on the lost object. That is, the repeated act of narration – which, on a meta level, constitutes a kind of journey in and of itself – corresponds to the mariner’s melancholic archaeology of a lost object and, in its ultimate consequence, to the re‐enactment of its loss. With that said, we can now have a closer look at the origin of the mariner’s archival desire, i. e. the lost object he feverishly tries to archive, and can question the role that (imagined) spaces play within this process. On the 16th of October 1797, Coleridge writes a letter to John Thelwall in which he gives voice to a metaphysical longing that he sees as the driving force of his poetry: I can at times feel strongly the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves—but more frequently all things appear little—all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child’s

 Note the repeated references to his “skinny hand” (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 9, 229), which can be identified with the melancholic’s general tendency to be skinny, dry and pale (see e. g. Burton 1989: 381– 384).

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play—the universe itself—what but an immense heap of little things?—I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little—!—My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great— something one & indivisible—and it is only in the faith of that that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! (Coleridge 1956: 349)

Coleridge’s yearning for (organic) totality and transcendence – which is strongly influenced by his Unitarian background¹³⁴ – coincides not only with the composition of the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (and, not least, “Kubla Khan”) but also with a historical period that was characterised by a “crisis in belief, […] [being; D.K.] an episode in the larger and more general crisis in religion” (Benziger 1962: 10, see also 14, 17). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the poem has been frequently interpreted as religious/spiritual allegory, according to which, loss of faith and religion (also in a more pantheistic sense) and their subsequent restoration substantially inform the structure of the mariner’s voyage.¹³⁵ In fact, the latter can be figuratively read as a (repeated) search for this ideal, a movement through its poetic/imaginative archive, whereby the depicted spaces play a crucial role inasmuch as they both act as sites of mourning/loss and spatial archives. Already the voyage’s (involuntary) destination reveals a great deal about the mariner’s (and the poet’s) yearning since the South Pole was still a terra incognita at the time of the poem’s composition – a remote, unspoilt and mysterious place (Lowes 1955: 106 – 113) far away from an increasingly industrialised England. Moreover, the genesis of the poem was heavily influenced by William Wales’s accounts of James Cook’s second voyage, which Coleridge eagerly read during his time at Christ’s hospital.¹³⁶ As Smith notes in this regard, the “tales of far voyages satisfied something very close to his own nature, and that in imagination” (1956: 153). Not least, the poem also echoes the epoch’s preoccupation with cartography in that it spatially maps (and, in so doing, archives) the

 “the idea of the Unitarian ‘God is one’ clearly informed the ‘One Life’ philosophy which was so influential in his [Coleridge’s; D.K.] poetry of the later 1790s, in his collaboration with Wordsworth and in the development of the Lyrical Ballads (1798)” (Moore and Strachan 2010: 94).  See, for example, Jerome McGann’s remark that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner “dramatises a salvation story, but it is not the old story of our salvation in Christ; rather, it is the new story of our salvation of Christ” (McGann 1981: 54), or Blades (2004: 202– 205) and White (2009), who read the poem also as a projection of Coleridge’s spiritual crisis: “Coleridge was afflicted with what Burton and others aptly described as religious melancholy, a symptom of a natural defect that regularly manifested itself in his writings as a psychological compulsion to find self-incriminating moral explanations for his otherwise unfathomable anguish” (White 2009: 816).  See Smith (1956) for a thorough analysis of these influences in (the composition of) the poem.

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unknown. The mariner’s (accidental) journey to the South Pole hence adheres to Coleridge’s longing to “know something great” (1956: 349), with his search for artistic and spiritual transcendence¹³⁷ through the act of spatially archiving. In this sense, it is noteworthy that the respective spaces are associated with abounding religious connotations. First and foremost, the personification of the sun (a symbol for the presence of the divine, God [Daemmrich and Daemmrich 1995: 322]) must be mentioned, shining “bright” at the outset of the voyage and gets “Higher and higher every day” (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 27, 29). Accordingly, the presence of the divine increases more and more as the ship approaches the equator. Moreover, when they sail beyond it and eventually reach the “land of ice” (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 55 – 58), the scene suddenly changes: similar to the Bakhtinian chronotope of a “miraculous world”, the crew is surrounded by ice “[a]s green as emerald”, “wondrous cold” and “snowy cliffs” that oxymoronically “send a dismal sheen” (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 54, 52, 55, 56). Overall, a sublime and almost otherworldly space is depicted, again carrying Christian overtones (such as the white color of the snow, which symbolically represents virginity and purity [Gretz 2008; Grube and May 2008], or the color green, which is also the Christian symbol of eternal life [Ajouri 2008: 140]). In accordance with Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime (Burke 1998: part I, section VII), these spaces also simultaneously evoke terror due to their fearful sounds, strange sights and dangerousness. Amid this sublime space, the albatross finally appears and completes these religious symbols by being explicitly identified as “Christian soul” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 65). It benevolently follows (and seems to guide) the ship through the night and moves within a glimmering “white Moonshine” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 78), the latter evoking anew the presence of the divine while combining it with the notion of purity via the color white.¹³⁸ This section serves as a memory of a lost ideal, projected onto remote and sublime spaces. Tellingly, these spaces are not the mariner’s final destination, thus rather hinting at the prospect of a divine, spiritual ideal. And it is precisely the prospect of finding this ideal, of finding the unspoilt origin and totality, which kindles the mariner’s feverish search. Observed from a superordinate perspective, this search should also be extended to the very act of narration. In particular, each re-iteration of the mariner’s tale is also a movement through his

 See Blades (2004: 199): “The poem can be interpreted as Coleridge’s reaching after the world of the sublime via the pathway of nature. […] In a form of metaphysical idealism, the Romantic poet boldly penetrates the cracks in the natural order opened up by the uncanny and into the supernatural reality beyond.”  For the association of the moon and the divine, see, for example, Daemmrich and Daemmrich (1995: 257– 258).

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own spatial archives, throughout the course of which he explores his places of remembrance and loss, feverishly trying to find/archive the desired object. Further abstracting from the level of the mariner’s narration, the poem itself can ultimately be related to the Bakhtinian chronotope of “historical inversion”: not only is the mariner’s (involuntary/unconscious) destination located in a remote region, but the whole tale is situated in a remote past as the poem’s archaising narrative style (especially that of the original version) and the glosses in the paratext¹³⁹ suggest. Accordingly, Coleridge’s own search for artistic and spiritual transcendence in the present is projected onto spaces (and tales) of the past. Against this backdrop, William Wordsworth might have been too harsh in criticising the poem’s “old words and the strangeness of it” (1967: 264) in his letter to Joseph Cottle in 1799. Quite the contrary, the archaic style matches perfectly with the mariner’s (and the poet’s) archival fever; following the logic of the chronotope, time and space are mutually dependent as they fuse the search for a remote/unknown, pristine space (and the transcendental ideas it refers to) with the notion of a remote, (un)familiar¹⁴⁰ archaic time. This ideal, however, is never fully present in its poetic/spatial archive but rather represents a spectral presence/absence. By the end of the poem’s first part, the mariner shoots the albatross – at first glance, a thoughtless act (“’With my crossbow / I shot the ALBATROSS”; Coleridge 2000a: ll. 81– 82) that spurs the mariner’s odyssey: The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 86 – 89)

As the sun’s changed motion suggests (note that at the outset of the journey, “The Sun came up upon the left, / […] and on the right / Went down into the sea.”; Coleridge 2000a: ll. 25 – 28), the ship is now moving northwards (Lowes 1955: 115 – 117), hence departing from the South Pole and the transcen-

 Jerome McGann generally situates the mariner’s tale in the sixteenth century and the glosses in the late seventeenth century, although noting that there are further historical layers (1981: 50 – 51, 57).  As Susan Eilenberg notes, Coleridge’s poem is characterized by a certain (un)familiarity since the voyage can be roughly dated around 1500 (and the fictional author of the gloss around 1700) due to its archaisms and historical references, while the artificiality of “his imitation-antique language” (1999: 296) evokes a strange unfamiliarity at the same time (1999: 293 – 296).

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dental ideal(s) it is spatially associated with. It may be puzzling to consider why the mariner kills the albatross. However, in keeping with the perspective of archive fever, the killing of the albatross can be read as the mariner’s re-enactment of his loss (i. e. his spiritual, transcendental ideal identified with/archived in the space of the South Pole along with its association with the albatross) and coincides with the melancholic’s narcissistic attachment to his (lost) object of desire (i. e. being “the one who kills the object a second time (treats it as lost) before the object is actually lost” [Žižek 2000: 662] over the course of its sublimatory symbolisation). In this regard, it is remarkable that the mariner notices within his condition (i. e. in his feverish compulsion to tell his “ghastly tale”; Coleridge 2000a: l. 584) a “strange power of speech” (Colerdige 2000a: l. 587). This can be accounted for by considering the relationship between the latter and the Kristevian notion of the melancholic’s peculiar connection to language, which sees the melancholic’s use of language oscillate between a creative, almost sublimatory semiotisation of the symbolic (i. e. the poetic evocation/archiving of the lost object) on the one hand, and destructive asymbolia (i. e. the destruction of the object; the re‐enactment of its loss) on the other hand. In other words, within the (imaginary) spatial archive the mariner continuously evokes the loss of the object instead of (fully) deferring it to the symbolic. It, therefore, inhabits a liminal space within its (his) archive, being both present and absent at the same time – an ambivalent double-movement of reconstruction and deconstruction, of fort and da, which constitutes the melancholic’s ambivalent pleasure in sorrow. The destructive aspect of the archive and its close affiliation with melancholia is especially dominant in the poem’s second to fourth part. Soon after the bird’s slaughtering, the scene and the ship are transformed into spatial manifestations of melancholia’s destructiveness. At first, we are confronted with several instances of stasis and monotony, such as the still ship amid “[t]he silence of the sea” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 110) or various repetitions (e. g. the geminatio in “Day after day, day after day” and “Water, water, everywhere” with its reiteration two lines later, or the pleonastic construction in “slimy things did crawl with legs”; Coleridge 2000a: ll. 115, 119, 125). Eventually, a phantom ship appears, bringing with it allegorical personifications of death and “LIFE-IN-DEATH” (Coleridge 2000a: 193) which cast dice that will determine the fate of the crew. While “death” wins the crew’s life, “life-in-death” wins the mariner’s life: Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres?

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Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a DEATH? and are there two? Is DEATH that woman’s mate? Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold. The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; ’The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’ Quoth she, and whistles thrice. (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 181– 198)

This passage is remarkable for two reasons: first, it is no coincidence that the melancholic subject allegorically expresses its denial of negation (i. e. its inability to construct meaningful conjunctions) via a game that is based on arbitrariness/randomness. Moreover, his ship floats (non-orientable) amid a no‐man’s land which also spatially evokes the melancholic’s loss of reference; second, and above all, LIFE-IN-DEATH precisely represents the fate of the mariner (and the melancholic). Melancholy is, in Kristeva’s words, a “living death” (1989: 4) as it is not only characterised by a general loss of reference but also by instances of monotonous repetitions and ultimately by stasis (which are, in turn, manifestations of the death drive).¹⁴¹ Accordingly, the mariner is both located within stasis (the “silent sea”, which later becomes a “rotting sea” in the “thick […] night”, spatially mirroring the “rotting deck”; Coleridge 2000a: ll. 106, 240, 206, 242) while also being doomed to repetition¹⁴² as the poem’s macrostructure shows.¹⁴³

 See ch. II.3.2 of the present study.  See White (2009: 824): “To relive the past by telling the same story two hundred times a year for fifty years is a sure sign of an obsessive-compulsive disorder and a clear indication that the mariner has not made any serious attempt to alleviate the agony that afflicts him. Rhyming is the mariner’s opium. It affords temporary relief but does not get to the heart of the problem.”

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In the final sections of the poem which follow, the mariner undergoes a series of expiation and penance, submerged in religious vocabulary and imagery. After blessing the water-snakes, the “spell begins to break” (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 288 – 291): he falls asleep and awakes amid a refreshing rain, which the attached gloss attributes to the “grace of the holy Mother” (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 297– 300) and which can be loosely related to the act of baptism. Thereupon, “spirits blest” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 349) enter the corpses and put the ship into motion, moving it towards the mariner’s native country. His expiation is also spatially mirrored as the sun begins to shine again benevolently and the skylark’s song, an “angel’s song” (Colerdige 2000a: l. 365) as described by the mariner, breaks with the silence of the preceding section/spaces. Eventually, he reaches the “ocean green” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 443) – the colour green being a symbol for renewal – and his cursed ship sinks as he meets a hermit to whom he confesses his sin. The sequence of expiation and redemption, however, has to be observed critically in light of what has been previously mentioned. First and foremost, the mariner is taken back to his starting point and hence away from the South Pole and the transcendental ideals it hints at. As a result, he is still afflicted by a feverish desire to find the transcendental (space) (again), to fill his spiritual void,¹⁴⁴ and therefore seeks it out within the re-enactment of his tale. Second, the recourse to religious frames of reference is only of a sublimatory nature since we cannot forget that the tale is narrated retrospectively by the subjective perspective of the (remembering) mariner, who tries to understand the strange archival fever he suffers.¹⁴⁵ The religious explanations are thus only retrospectively grafted (McGann 1981: 51– 52; White 2009: 820 – 822; Stokes 2011: 88; Prickett 1976: 17) on the mariner’s experiences, rendering him – to a

 See also Eilenberg (1999), who stresses in her reading of the poem the “Mariner’s difficulties with language” (284): “Despite the excess of his later speech, his relation to language is […] that almost of an aphasic.” (284).  See Prickett (1976: 13): “Is the Mariner’s final state indeed one of irreparable damage where he can no longer take part in the simple ceremonies of innocence? – in which case the religious coda we have been discussing is not a statement of what he has found, but what he has lost for ever.”  See also (in a slightly different context) White, who argues that Coleridge suffered from depression and that he “struggled throughout his life and writings to reconcile mental disorder with the Christian conception of moral guilt” (2009: 808). As a result, “The mariner repeatedly seeks to remedy the distress of mental disorder by sheltering it under the canopy of religious morality. It appears not to work […] In fact, within The Rime itself, neither penance, remorse, shriving, nor churchgoing is shown to be capable of providing any relief for the mariner’s mental anguish” (White 2009: 831).

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certain extent – an unreliable narrator. This can be seen, for example, when the mariner concedes that he “blessed them [the water-snakes; D.K:] unaware” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 287), therefore, clearly constructing a retrospective, religious explanation for the subsequent change in weather.¹⁴⁶ The same applies, on a superordinate narrative level, to the text’s glosses which additionally interpret the tale through abundant religious references and occasionally enrich its content,¹⁴⁷ altogether grafting another document on the poem and therefore modifying its own archive. The mariner’s transformation of places into spaces (and vice versa) through his repeated re-telling is thus redoubled on a material level in that the manuscript constitutes a place that Coleridge navigates anew (i. e. turns into a space) in the course of its various revisions. To take some examples: the rain in part five is ascribed to the “grace of the holy Mother” (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 297– 300) and the change in weather is, following a Christian teleology, seen as a sign that “the “spell begins to break” (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 288 – 291) so that by the sixth part “[t]he curse is finally expiated” (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 442– 445). Moreover, while the mariner tells about “the Spirit that plagued us” (Coleridge 2000a: l. 132), the writer of the gloss extends this passage to A spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more. (Coleridge 2000a: gloss to ll. 131– 134)

Instead of being an allegorical tale of expiation and redemption, the grafting of these religious frames of reference rather exposes the mariner’s and the narrator’s archival fever. It indicates their desire for transcendence and spirituality, to find the divine within the natural world (the voyage) and to archive it within the very tale; the retrospective interpretation(s) through religious ideology is a supplementation of the archived material with the aim of laying bare its (sup-

 As Christopher Stokes argues in this regard, the blessing of the water-snakes “seems to offer only temporary relief” (2000: 90) and the poem’s Christian framework turns out to be highly ambiguous (2000: 88, 90 – 91).  See McGann (1981: 65): “The mariner interprets his experiences by his own lights, and each subsequent mediator – the ballad transmitters, the author of the gloss, and Coleridge himself – all represent their specific cultural views.”

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posed) religio-allegorical essence, i. e. the spiritual ideal that the mariner and Coleridge¹⁴⁸ feverishly long for. The glosses thereby echo the epoch’s flourishing print culture and the author’s archival desire to obtain interpretative authority over his document, i. e. by acting as the archon of his archive and imposing his hermeneutic law on the document. Moreover, from an editorial perspective, the question of there being an “authoritative” document among this archive equally arises given the numerous versions of the poem; is it the last version (implying a certain evolutionary‐progressive act of artistic composition), the original (first) version (without the glosses), or do all versions of the poem in their multiplicity (i. e. the “whole” archive of the poem constituted by its individual documents) constitute “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”? Conforming to a reading based on the latter would loosely adhere to Coleridge’s idea of unity in multitude:¹⁴⁹ “to create, in his poems taken all together, the kind of unity in multeity–the harmonious whole made out of the separate parts–that he described in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere as the ideal of poetic art” (Stillinger 1992: 144). Or should it rather be seen as an instance of incompleteness, i. e. that Coleridge “may have wished to suggest that the perfect poem was a chimera and that authority itself was therefore a fiction” (Stillinger 1992: 146)? Seen from the perspective of archive fever, the numerous revisions of the text and its glosses complement the poem’s circular structure in that they indicate the ways in which the archive is a constant process of supplementation and recontextualisation that is open to the future (what if we discovered yet another version of the poem?). Within this process, the archived material is present and absent at the same time, that is, the more the subject grafts various (archival) texts on the object, the more spectral (or incomplete) it becomes. Finally, the (partial) sublimation of the loss and its simultaneous negation also correspond to the melancholic’s ambivalent (re‐)construction and deconstruction of the desired object. This oscillation between sublimatory sense and asymbolia manifests itself particularly, as has been argued, in the motif of journey: the mariner’s voyage is a movement through various spatial archives that he constructs, reiterating the presence of the divine/sublime at the beginning (not least, by the re-interpretation carried out through religious and pantheistic frames of reference), re‐enacting its loss in the middle part (the killing of the albatross and the appearance of the phantom ship) and ending in circularity by

 See Dilworth (2007: 511): “The gloss seems to be a palimpsest through which we see Coleridge”.  For the delineated editorial questions, see Stillinger (1992: 128 – 130, 140 – 141, 144– 145).

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returning to the place of commencement (i. e. the mariner remains affected by a feverish desire to recount his tale). It is precisely this movement through the various spatial archives, the continuous process of archiving and destruction, of the lost object’s presence and absence, which ultimately constitutes the archive as such, rendering the various chronotopes as spatial archives for the concurrent manifestations of memory, loss and desire.

2.2 Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage The journey through spatial archives similarly acts as a determinant in George Gordon Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, albeit with a different focus. Whereas the origin of the ancient mariner’s archive fever can be traced back to the loss of spiritual/religious transcendence and his voyage locates itself in a remote (or rather unspecified) past, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is embedded in a more concrete (media‐)historical and biographical context; it is a journey through (post‐)Napoleonic Europe, a mourning for the loss of (its) ideals and a search for (collective) identity (Büchel 2007: 78 – 80). Not least, it is a product of the period’s print culture in that Byron not only projects his own biographical drama(s) onto the text (Büchel 2007: 74 – 75), but also exteriorises them by constructing a public image made possible by the resounding success of the poem’s publication (more than 5000 copies were sold within the first 6 months after the publication of Canto I and Canto II), further aided by the marketing employed by his publisher, John Murray.¹⁵⁰ Through these modes of public engagement, Byron became one of the first modern celebrities – a culture of celebrity that started in the Romantic period (Mole 2007: XI) and where self-fashioning through the construction of one’s public archive played (and still plays) an important role. In contrast to the circular structure of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, throughout the course of which its spatial archives allude to the future as they repeatedly constitute the precondition of their subsequent retrospection, Childe Harold’s (and the narrator’s) journey is essentially regressive. It is an archaeology of origins that is influenced by a fundamental fever to archive, mirroring the epoch’s numerous archaeological expeditions and desire to gather cultural artefacts (especially within the context of the museum and the expansion of the Empire): starting from a journey through Napoleonic Europe in the first

 See Franklin (2007: 10 – 11) for details surrounding the poem’s success and the marketing of Byron.

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canto, the third canto begins with Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo and eventually goes back in time as it traces the origins of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire (Lansdown 2012: 71, 76). Beyond that, the poem is a search for (and also an attempt to archive) the roots of western civilisation/culture and those of Harold’s (and the narrator’s) identity which is closely related to the historical moments and cultural artefacts gathered throughout the various spaces in the poem. The latter function as sites and objects of concurrent loss and remembrance – a simultaneity which is melancholically explored in the course of the journey and which ultimately reveals the ambivalent nature of the archive(‘s fever). The obsession with origins is already observable from the poem’s first stanza: Oh, thou! in Hellas deem’d of heavenly birth, Muse! form’d or fabled at the minstrel’s will! Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth, Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill: Yet there I’ve wander’d by thy vaunted rill; Yes! sigh’d o’er Delphi’s long deserted shrine, Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still; Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine To grace so plain a tale – this lowly lay of mine. (Byron 1980c: canto I, ll. 1– 9)

The archaic style and the invocation of the muses places the poem in the context of the ancient Graeco-Roman literary tradition. Additionally, Byron revives the Spenserian stanza, introduced by Spenser in his famous epic The Faerie Queene, thus also evoking the Golden Age of the Elizabethan era. Together with the protagonist’s chivalric title, the glorious (and idealised) past of heroes, their great deeds and the corresponding literary tradition of the epic are all evoked and intertextually archived in the poem. Against this backdrop, it is no coincidence that Byron refers to the “weary Nine” muses “[t]o grace so plain a tale” as they are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory: Harold’s (and the narrator’s) pilgrimage is a journey through the places and associated memories of a lost (cultural) past, an exploration of its poetic/spatial archive(s), kindled by the “painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin” (Derrida 1995: 54, see also 9). In the following stanza, the underlying ambivalence of his journey is already hinted at by making reference to Britain with its archaic name, Albion: on the one hand, this reference alludes to Britain’s mythic past and becomes, through its close proximity to the first stanza, also associated with the epoch of the Renaissance and the myth of the Golden Age. On the other hand, it functions as a spatial placeholder, i. e. as a cipher for the loss

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of its mythical, cultural past since it is precisely this absence (evoked within the presence of its very memory) which causes Harold’s voyage. “[S]ick at heart” and in “joyless reverie”, Harold has to leave his native land to find “climes beyond the sea” (Byron 1980c: canto I, stanza 6), the latter spatially pointing to the infinite, to the notion of a golden past that is now absent.¹⁵¹ Notwithstanding the numerous echoes of Lord Byron’s life throughout these stanzas, such as “the fullness of satiety” or the “Sin’s long labyrinth [Harold; D.K.] had run” (Byron 1980c: canto I, ll. 34, 37), one should not be misled with regard to the reasons for his voyage as these (carnal) excesses may only be symptoms (or rather sublimatory Ersatzobjekte) of a void that goes much deeper, namely the experience of estrangement, the loss of the ideal(s of the French Revolution) and the loss of (cultural) identity amid the trials and tribulations of (post‐)Napoleonic Europe. In short, these abstract losses decisively structure the pilgrimage insofar as they result in an archival fever to gather numerous cultural artifacts within their respective places and, in so doing (i. e. by turning them into spaces/spatially archiving them), they excavate an idealised past/origin. Harold’s first pilgrimage, which takes him through the political chaos of early 19th century Europe (most notably the Peninsular War), is not only an exploration of the contradictions between idealised heroism and the sobering realities of war (Lansdown 2012: 71– 75; Martin 2004: 82– 86; Büchel 2007: 84), but is also a journey back in time: culminating in contemporary Athens, Harold traces the roots of western civilisation and culture to ancient Greece whose cultural heritage materialises itself among a complex spatial archive. The speaker is clearly afflicted by an archival fever that surfaces in his desire to “trace / The latent grandeur” and to “Restore what Time hath labour’d to deface” (Byron 1980c: canto II, ll. 85 – 86, 87), i. e. in his attempt to defy the destructive effects of temporality (and the course of history) and to excavate Greece’s (and, by extension, Europe’s and his own) cultural origins within these ruins/sites of loss. At the sight of the Parthenon’s “broken arch, ruin’d wall, / Its chambers desolate, and portals foul”, the speaker identifies it as the “Abode of gods” (Byron 1980c: canto II, ll. 46 – 47, 22) and evokes the mythological tradition through his apostrophes to Athena (“Goddess of Wisdom”; Byron 1980c: canto II, l. 3) and Zeus (“Here, son of Saturn! Was thy fav’rite throne”; Byron 1980c: canto II, l. 84). These (first fifteen) stanzas are characterised by a tension between the decaying temple with its “shrines [that; D.K.] no longer burn” (Byron 1980c: canto II, l. 22) on the one side, and the presence of the mythological tra-

 See Hanke (1981: 117) for the Romantics’ general association of remote regions with notions of “a primal golden past and unity of being that have been lost in the present” (1981: 117).

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dition (“here thy [Athena’s; D.K.] temple was, / And is”; Byron 1980c: canto II, ll. 3 – 4), on the other side. In other words, whereas the archive (the temple) disintegrates, the archived material – i. e. Greece’s mythological and philosophical tradition (e. g. the reference to Socrates in “Athena’s wisest son! / ‘All that we know is, nothing can be known’”; Byron 1980c: canto II, ll. 55 – 56) – seems to persist. However, this cultural heritage is seriously threatened as the projection of the historical dimension onto these spaces suggests (Byron 1980c: canto II, stanzas 1, 3, 10 – 13, 15), namely by the presence of the Ottoman Empire and also by British plunderers (particularly Lord Elgin), synecdochically making the temple “a nation’s sepulchre” (Byron 1980c: canto II, l. 21). Moreover, the ruined temple also becomes a site of lost ideals since it “was once Ambition’s airy hall”, moving the speaker to ask “Where are thy [Athena’s; D.K.] men of might? thy grand in soul?” (Byron 1980c: canto II, ll. 48, 9). Fusing time and space, the remains of the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis hence constitute a spatial archive in which the mythological, the historical, the cultural, the personal and the architectural blend. The imaginative exploration of the Parthenon – i. e. its archiving within the poem and revisiting in the course of the literary journey – is thereby constantly oscillating between an evocation of its cultural and mythical substrate and a melancholic awareness of its loss (spatially mirrored by the decaying temple). With regard to the latter, it is finally noteworthy that the speaker abandons Harold until stanza 16 (“But where is Harold? shall I then forget / To urge the gloomy wanderer o’er the wave?”; Byron 1980c: canto II, ll. 136 – 137): by abandoning Harold¹⁵² as a mediating (sublimatory) instance, the speaker himself becomes the very loss, thus unveiling the melancholic’s excessive fixation on the lost object as well as his inability to detach from it – a process where the subject itself becomes an archive, which shall be scrutinised at a later point using the example of John Keats’s odes. The speaker’s melancholic disposition manifests itself further in the fourth canto where he continues to trace Europe’s cultural roots back to Italy: And even since, and now, fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; (Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 227– 229)

 As the poem advances, Harold fades increasingly into the background: “By canto 3, however, Harold has become at most a shadow figure, and by canto 4 he has virtually disappeared, leaving the subjective Byronic consciousness in possession of the rest of the poem” (Hill 1986: 121). See, in this regard, also Franklin (2007: 38) and McGann (1968: 67– 93).

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The pleasure he gets from excavating these origins, however, is substantially bound to their loss: “Thy [Italy’s; D.K.] wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced / With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 233 – 234). This ambivalent double movement is already decisive for the canto’s initial depiction of Venice. Standing on the Bridge of Sighs, the speaker first notices the presence of the past as “[a] thousand years their cloudy wings expand / Around me”¹⁵³ yet also simultaneously stressing its absence (“a dying glory smiles / O’er the far times”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 6 – 7). The historical dimension is then enriched with mythological allusions as the view shifts to the city’s exterior in the subsequent stanza: She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, Rising with her tiara of proud towers At airy distance, with majestic motion (Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 10 – 12)

Finally, Byron switches the perspective back to the city’s centre and evokes “Tasso’s echoes” which are, however, “no more” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, l. 19). Similar to the previous depiction of the Parthenon, Venice is (re‐)constructed as a spatial archive in which history, myth, literature, architecture and, not least, the personal¹⁵⁴ merge. Despite several allusions to their loss – which additionally express an anxious consciousness regarding the precarious materiality of such spatial archives and their accumulation of objects – the speaker metapoetically invokes the power of his poetic archive for “[t]he beings of the mind are not of clay” and “[e]ssentially immortal” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 37, 39). This is a crucial passage insofar as it unveils the speaker’s desire to timelessly preserve the (cultural) memory of Venice, i. e. an idealised (literary) memory of it, with the ultimate aim of “replenishing the void” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, l. 45). Yet, this presence is at the same time marked by a strong sense of absence, additionally mirrored by the decaying spaces (such as the “palaces […] crumbling to the shore” or in “States fall, arts fade […] Venice once was dear” [Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 21, 24]) and the various allusions to silence (for example Tasso’s lost echoes, “silent rows the songless gondolier” or the “music meets not always now the ear” [Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 20, 22]). These instances of silence turn out to

 Byron (1980c: canto IV, ll. 5 – 6). Later, Venice’s history is further explicated (see, for example, stanzas 12 and 13).  See Hill (1986: 134– 135): “Byron establishes a parallel between himself and the city, or rather, the city comes increasingly to mirror him. The city’s history is to the city as Byron’s past is to Byron”.

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be especially relevant since they also point to the workings of the destructive death drive and its regressive tendency, the notion of stasis. In other words, the silence in Venice (i. e. the absence of sublimatory music and songs) metaphorically represents the absence of meaningful conjunctions, asymbolia and, thus, corresponds to the melancholic’s introjection of the object’s loss within the very process of archiving it – an act of both archiving and destruction, thereby constituting the ambivalent nature of the archive(’s fever). The destructive aspect of the (fever to) archive and its close affiliation with melancholy is finally laid bare in Byron’s reflections on the Colosseum (1980c: canto IV, stanzas 128 – 145). At the sight of its history and decay, Byron projects his own personal drama(s) onto this place. Similar to the “power / And magic in the ruined battlement” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, l. 1159), time shall also avenge him, making him immortal or even some kind of martyr (Bode 2008: 132– 133; Franklin 2007: 48 – 49): Amid this wreck, where thou hast made a shrine And temple more divinely desolate, Among thy mightier offerings here are mine, Ruins of years—though few, yet full of fate: If thou hast ever seen me too elate, Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne Good, and reserved my pride against the hate Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn This iron in my soul in vain – shall they not mourn? And thou, who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis! Here, where the ancient paid thee homage long – Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss For that unnatural retribution – just, Had it but been from hands less near – in this Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust! Dost thou not hear my heart? – Awake! thou shalt, and must. (Byron 1980c: canto IV, stanzas 131– 132)

The equation of the Colosseum with Byron’s personal life is remarkable; the Colosseum as a spatial archive for Rome’s “chief trophies” and “all her triumphs” also becomes “a shrine” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 1145, 1146, 1171), an archive,

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for the ruins of Byron’s life in the course of the poem’s composition¹⁵⁵ and publication (“But in this page a record will I seek. / Not in the air shall these my words disperse, / Though I be ashes”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 1202– 1204). According to Christoph Bode, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a means for Byron to discursively construct his subjectivity in a performative dialogue with his audience/the public space, thereby exhibiting his (protagonist’s) melancholy (2008: 117, 122, 125, 133 – 134). Continuing his biographical archival desire in “On Leaving Newstead Abbey”, Byron substantially modifies his own public archive – an act of “medial self-fashioning” (Haekel 2015: 43) – aided by the now extended scope of publication and with the help of John Murray, who further shaped his public persona by including engravings of his portraits with the cantos (Franklin 2007: 10 – 11; Haekel 2018: 43 – 44). Seen from the perspective of archive fever, this performative character of the poem, that is Byron’s narcissistic sensationalism and self‐fashioning, further contributes to the melancholic archival fever. This can be accounted for by considering the aforementioned equation, where Byron has not only abandoned Harold as a mediating instance but has also literally become himself the very loss¹⁵⁶ (spatially embodied by the ruin of the Colosseum and its re-construction within the poetic archive). The structural principle of the motif of journey, therefore, corresponds to the melancholic subject’s re‐enactment of the object’s loss via the exploration of its various archives – a movement that is an extreme prolongation and performative flaunting of the gesture of loss, eventually extending itself to the perpetual construction of his public persona, the melancholic Byronic hero, as “medial effect”¹⁵⁷. Together with his apostrophe to time as “the beautifier of the dead, / Adorner of the ruin” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 1162– 1163) the melancholic’s ambivalent pleasure in sorrow is ultimately unveiled; the timelessness/finality of death (or the lost object) is transferred into a temporal structure in the course of the melancholic’s narcissistic fixation on the lost object. That is, the latter’s loss is re‐enacted and maintained in his poetic/imaginative archive – in “Veil’d Melancholy[‘s] […] Sovran shrine” as John Keats (2000a: l. 26) will write one year later – in order to relish the act of its loss.

 See also McGann (1968: 31– 66), who stresses the interweaving of the (spaces throughout the) journey and the poet’s psychological development/pilgrimage.  See, in this regard, also Newey (1988: 148): “The ‘I’, the subject writing, is literally ‘nothing’ […] Childe Harold III and IV is pervaded by this sense of the self as that which is constantly brought into existence in the mind and through language – and which is therefore also always provisional and on the point of dissolution.”  See Haekel (2015: 50 – 53) for author and Byronic hero as “medial effect”.

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Though ending where it started, the sea, the Childe’s journey differs significantly from the Ancient Mariner’s hopeless circularity; in line with the structural conventions of the pilgrimage motif,¹⁵⁸ Harold (or, to be more precise, the speaker) has worked towards a more complex position. After having explored various origins throughout his journey (via the act of collecting and spatially archiving), the speaker now returns to the absolute origin, epitomised through the metaphor of the sea. The primarily worldly values are now replaced by a strengthened, almost Wordsworthian, appraisal of nature (“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore, […] I love not man less, but nature more”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 1594– 1598) in which he strives “[t]o mingle with the Universe, and feel / What [he; D.K.] can ne’er express” (Byron 1980c: canto IV, 1601– 1602). Accordingly, the sea is attributed a timeless, eternal quality (“Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, l. 1637) and associated with the divine (“Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form / Glasses itself”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, l. 1639 – 1640). With the depiction of the sea as an infinite and sublime space – a spatial archive of originality and existential totality, which can be related to the Bakhtinian chronotope of the “miraculous world” – the speaker’s melancholic fever to archive is ultimately laid bare as it corresponds to his desire to return to the unspoilt origin of existence; a primal state. On that note, it is no coincidence that in the canto’s final stanzas the sea is explicitly referred to with maternal attributes (for example in “my joy / Of youthful sports was in thy breast to be” or in “I was as it were a child of thee”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 1648 – 1649, 1654), pointing to the melancholic’s most archaic loss; the separation from the mother. The sea is, therefore, a space that represents both the memory and loss of the mother. And it is in the speaker’s return to the sea that the death drive becomes particularly evident. For his return not only corresponds to the death drive’s regressive tendency (i. e. the sea as an imaginative reconstruction of /return to the absolute origin, the mother’s womb), but also to its movement towards the inanimate, death, as a final consequence:¹⁵⁹ the speaker abandons Harold (together with

 “A pilgrimage is a special form of travel: the destination is known beforehand and dominates the expedition, and as readers we expect a distinct moral contrast between the point of departure and the point of arrival. The pilgrim travels from darkness to light, blindness to insight, confusion to order, and from worldly values towards spiritual ones” (Lansdown 2012: 71).  The sea is a complex symbol in literature, generally representing the feminine, notions of origins, regression and, not least, death (Schneider 2008: 227– 228). In this passage, the multilayered symbolism of the sea ties in with Sigmund Freund’s conception of the death drive, which manifests itself in an unconscious desire to return to the mother’s womb (see Stumm/Pritz, Wör-

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the numerous acts of collecting cultural artifacts and spaces) as sublimatory instances once and for all. Now, images of silence abound (“my song hath ceased – my theme / Has died into an echo; it is fit”; Byron 1980c: canto IV, ll. 1657– 1658). Having oscillated throughout all of the cantos between archiving and destruction, sublimatory reconstruction and melancholic deconstruction, the spatial return to the absolute origin is consequently accompanied by a final loss of reference and artistic sublimation: silence and the poem’s end.

3 Archiving the Infinite: Sublime Spaces in William Wordsworth’s “Nutting” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” Having scrutinised the motif of journey and various places of remembrance in the previous chapters, we can now turn to a spatial archive of extreme transcendence that proves to be crucial for Romanticism: sublime spaces. Not only does nature constitute “the missing complement to human nature” (Frye 1983: 28) in view of the Romantics’ (self‐)estrangement (Frye 1983: 28), but its poetical (re‐)construction (as sublime nature) also corresponds with their archival fever to return to the absolute origin and, in so doing, reconstitute their original loss, i. e. “a sense of an original identity between the individual man and nature which has been lost” (Frye 1983: 17, see also 18, 37– 38). Accordingly, sublime spaces play an important part in Romantic poetry, such as William Wordsworth’s famous crossing of the Alps in the sixth book of The Prelude, Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”, John Keats’s sonnet “On the Sea” and, not least, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s highly imaginative constructions of sublime spaces unveiling the “eternal I AM” (Coleridge 1973: 202, see also Thesis VI). To the same extent that Romanticism is an utterly heterogenous movement, however, the poets’ notions of / approaches to the sublime also differ substantially. Coleridge, for instance, never approached the sublime systematically in his theoretical writings (Stokes 2011: 1), combining in his poems elements of Longinus’ “distinction and excellence in expression” (1979: I, 3) with Edmund Burke’s sublime of the terror¹⁶⁰ and Immanuel Kant’s (1995: §§ 23, 26) subject/ob-

terbuch der Psychotherapie 705). For the relation between melancholia, notions of the mother and death, see also Lechte (1990: 185).  “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous

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ject duality.¹⁶¹ With his concept of “symbol”¹⁶², Coleridge grounds the sublime on religion in that the symbol follows from “the idea of the absolute unity of God as the ground of being” (Trott 1998: 84), i. e. it represents the “oneness of object and subject, world and mind” (Trott 1998: 84) – in short, a totality/unity that he identifies with the sublime (Trott 1998: 84– 85). Yet, for Coleridge, language is ultimately insufficient to fully bridge this gap between subject and object, between signifier and signified, between “matter and the divine” (Shaw 2017: 143), the sublime thus emerging as a “feeling” precisely out of these limitations / this incompleteness (Shaw 2017: 125, 143). Wordsworth likewise uses elements of the Burkean and Longinian sublime and, though “[knowing] little if anything about Kant” (Milnes 2015: 44), features striking similarities with Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) (Milnes 2015: 43 – 44, Benziger 1962: 52– 55). In his unpublished fragment “The Sublime and the Beautiful”, Wordsworth explains the sublime as a phenomenon that is never isolated within an external object but rather exists in its interdependency with the perceiving subject: “To talk of an object as being sublime or beautiful in itself, without references to some subject by whom that sublimity or beauty is perceived, is absurd” (Wordsworth 1974b: ll. 263 – 266). Rather, the sublime contributes to the poet’s growth of mind via introspection (“a participation of which the mind must be elevated”; Wordsworth 1974b: ll. 90 – 91), resembling the Kantian sublime, which posits the notion that the sublime object also evokes transcendental ideas within the perceiving subject: “The true province of the philosopher is not to grope about in the external world […] but to look into his own mind & determine the law by which he is affected” (Wordsworth 1974b: ll. 273 – 278). Wordsworth conception of (sublime) imagination was later criticised by Keats as “egotistical sublime” (Keats 1958a: 386 – 388), contrasting it with his own concept of negative capability and the idea of impersonality instead. Using the example of Wordsworth’s “Nutting” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn”, the traditional concepts of the Romantic sublime and the (literary) phenomenon itself shall be re-evaluated through the critical lens of archive fever. It will be argued that the Romantics’ transformations of finite places into infinite, sublime spaces via imagination results in the creation of powerful spatial archives of originality and existential totality. Despite the latter’s presence, however, these spatial archives are at the same time marked by a fundamental (melancholic) sense to terror, is the source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” Burke (1998: part I, section VII).  For the sublime in Coleridge’s works, see Stokes (2011).  See also the chapter on symbol and allegory in the Statesman’s Manual (Coleridge 2000b: 489 – 491).

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of loss which not only constitutes the origin of their feverish (re‐)construction but also the outcome of their archiving processes. *** To begin with, it is striking that both poems are characterised by their search for (or rather their desire to recover) the unspoilt origin(al) within sublime spaces. In William Wordsworth’s “Nutting”, the youth’s search for a “dear nook / unvisited”, a “virgin scene” in a “far-distant wood” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 16 – 17, 21, 8)– i. e. a site that represents “the serenity, repose, and innocence of the lost garden of beginnings” (Westbrook (2001: 142)¹⁶³ – constitutes the ballad’s initiating plot element and can also be related to the poem’s macrostructure, i. e. to the remembering speaker¹⁶⁴ who similarly tries to re-construct (archive) the singularity of his original experiences that are associated with these sublime spaces. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, the paratext (here: the poem’s preface functioning as archiving exergue ¹⁶⁵) contextualises the subsequent poem as a fragmentary transcription and respectively as a “dim recollection” of his (opiate) vision, of “what had been originally” (Coleridge 2001a: 512). Already the poem’s first lines, i. e. Coleridge’s reference to “ALPH, the sacred river” (2001b: l. 3), unveil this desire for the origin(al). The river’s name can be associated with the Hebrew alphabet’s first letter, Aleph, thereby evoking the materiality of writing and the notion of originality, also in the sense of linguistic originality inasmuch as the poem strives to go beyond the textual in order to recreate the original sublime vision beyond any distorting mediating frames. Moreover, the name may also be related to the sacred river in the Garden of Eden. As John Beer (1985: 239 – 243) notes in this regard, however, the river in Coleridge’s poem refers to a state after the Fall as it does not return to the spring near the Tree of Life (for instance as depicted in John Milton’s Paradise Lost). The referential double movement of the presence and simultaneous absence of paradise clearly unveils

 As Deanne Westbrook shows, the hazel nuts in the poem also convey mythic connotations according to the northern tradition, i. e. “[a] growth of hazel trees is a sacred grove or sacred orchard wherein one obtains wealth and wisdom in meeting with the divine” (Westbrook 2001: 129).  In his notes on the poem, Wordsworth stresses its autobiographical elements: “Written in Germany; intended as part of a poem on my own life […] Like most of my school-fellows I was an impassioned nutter. For this pleasure, the Vale of Esthwaite, abounding in coppicewood, furnished in a very wide range. These verses arose out of the remembrance of feelings I had often had when a boy, and particularly in the extensive woods that still stretch from the side of Esthwaite Lake towards Graythwaite, the seat of the ancient family of Sandys” (Wordsworth 2005: 353).  For the concept of exergue, see Derrida (1995: 12).

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the desire for an uncorrupted primal state in light of its alluded loss, reminding us “that Eden is not to be permanently or totally regained” (Beer 1985: 242). The search for this paradise throughout the (re‐)construction of the lost vision, i. e. the speaker’s delving into the depths of the realm of the unconscious, is furthermore mirrored by abounding images of remote and unspoilt space, such as with recurring references to “caverns measureless to man” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 4, 27) or the “deep romantic chasm” located within “[a] savage place” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 12, 14). Not only does the fever to archive fundamentally manifest itself in the speakers’ yearning and search for the origin(al) within these sublime spaces, but it is also bound to a deep-rooted anxiety surrounding finitude and loss. According to Derrida, the threat of temporality’s destructive effects constitutes a decisive factor for the archival fever since “[t]here would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression” (Derrida 1995: 19). In this regard, it is noteworthy that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” originates precisely with the threat of forgetfulness, i. e. the preface functions as “a parable of loss” (Youngquist 1999: 896), engendering a noticeable productivity (Youngquist 1999: 896), namely the vision’s subsequent archiving within the composition of the poem itself. The (archival) desire to defy temporality can be further discerned in the way the various speakers (re‐)construct the respective sublime spaces, especially in the latter’s attribution of timeless qualities in the course of their spatial archiving: for one thing, in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 36) represents the ideal “realm of eternity” (Benziger 1962: 27) which transcends temporality (Benziger 1962: 27); and for another, in Wordsworth’s “Nutting” the “fairy water-breaks do murmur on / For ever” and the “dear nook” is pictured as “[u]nvisited, where not a broken bough / Dropped its withered leaves” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 33 – 34, 16, 17– 18), which metaphorically excludes its (inevitable) decay and the presence of the inexorable flux of time.¹⁶⁶ Overall, the various constructions of these spaces further unveil the poets’ fever to archive as they strive to move beyond temporality. By trying to permanently fix notions of the sublime within these spaces, i. e. by not only trying to reveal the origin(al) but also to preserve it beyond the destructive effects of temporality, powerful spatial archives are created – archives whose constructions, however, are highly fragile as will be shown at a later point.

 See also Westbrook (2001: 142) for the timeless quality of the spaces in “Nutting”.

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But prior to this, a brief look towards the excessiveness of the archival fever is necessary since it represents an important aspect of the archive’s fragility. As has been argued before, the act of feverish archiving produces a surplus of binding energy, which ties in with the phenomenon of melancholy as it points to the melancholic’s narcissistic fixation on the lost object and the resulting destructive effects within the archival process, most notably to the presence of the death drive and its disintegrating power. Correspondingly, the fever to archive in the aforementioned examples is also accompanied by a noticeable sense of excessiveness: in the preface of “Kubla Khan”, the author stresses that he “could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines” (Coleridge 2001a: 511) as countless images presented themselves to him until he woke up and “eagerly wrote down the lines” (Coleridge 2001a: 512). Not only is Coleridge’s poem composed in an opium-induced state of Dionysian frenzy,¹⁶⁷ but these images are, tellingly, only preserved in fifty-four lines of a fragment – a deeply romantic genre whose incompletion also implies the notion of (excessive) infinity. In Wordsworth’s “Nutting”, the youth’s journey to/search for the sublime nook – and, respectively, the lyrical I’s archiving of the latter within the poem – is equally marked by this sense of excessiveness. This can be seen, first and foremost, in the indication of the boy’s “eagerness” and in the concession that he was “[m] ore ragged than need was” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 4, 14) – aspects that may also be metapoetically related to the speaker and his (excessive) construction of the poetical archive. On that note, it is striking that the speaker eagerly describes the boy’s journey to the nook with only two sentences that extend over eighteen lines,¹⁶⁸ which are linked via numerous run-on lines. These lines feature various repetitions, which further imply the excessive nature related to the act of archiving, such as alliterations (“brakes, and brambles”, “broken bough”; Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 13, 17) and the characterisation of the nook’s location as a “far-distant wood” (Wordsworth 2006b: l. 8), the latter’s attribution constituting a pleonasm whose redundancy also contributes to the excessiveness conveyed through the overall depiction. *** But what precisely is archived in these spaces and what are the characteristics of the underlying archival processes? As revealed by taking a closer look at the poems’ spatial archives, the sense of excessiveness that has been outlined in re See Youngquist (1999: 895 – 896) for the notion of Dionysian states, excess and their relation to loss in “Kubla Khan”.  Wordsworth (2006b: ll. 4– 14 and 14– 21). In each instance, only a semicolon (ll. 7 and 19) may suggest a slightly longer pause and interrupt the (excessive) flow of the sentence.

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lation to the fever to archive has also a decisive impact on the various archives themselves, thereby involving far-reaching implications. The nook in Wordsworth’s “Nutting” constitutes both the place of the youth’s sublime experience¹⁶⁹ and the lost object that the speaker tries to reconstruct and spatially archive over the course of the poem. Its sublime qualities are primarily alluded to through the speaker’s awareness of the wood’s divine qualities by the end of the poem (“there is a spirit in the woods”; Wordsworth 2006b: l. 56) and by the famous Wordsworthian “murmur” (which we also hear in “Tintern Abbey” or in The Prelude’s first book, where the personified river “loved to blend his murmurs with my [Wordsworth’s; D.K.] song”; Wordsworth 1985: book I, ll. 270 – 271), suggesting the presence of the sublime: Where fairy water-breaks do murmur on For ever; and I saw the sparkling foam, And—with my cheek on one of those green stones, That, fleeced with moss, under the shady trees, Lay round me, scattered like a flock of sheep— I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound, In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay Tribute to ease; […] (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 33 – 40)

Starting with notable consonance comprised of rhotic sounds in lines 30 – 31 (“Where fairy water-breaks do murmur on / For ever;”), which onomatopoetically bring to mind the rumbling of the water, the overwhelming and sublime qualities of nature are similarly captured in the excessive syntax: extending over seven lines, the two main clauses are coordinated (“and I saw the sparkling foam, / And […] I heard the murmur”), whereas the latter is pre- and post-modified via two hypotactic constructions, which are again modified by various hypo- and parataxes. The parenthesis from lines 35 – 37, for example, is divided by four hypotaxes that modify the “green stones”, which are additionally parenthesised by the half-rhyming “cheek” and “sheep”. Moreover, the parenthesis’s graphemic realisation denoted through a dash produces an initial caesura, imposing an anapaestic metre on “with my cheek” within the otherwise iambic line. The initial anapaest produces here an accelerating effect that eventually decelerates in the calm regularity of the subsequent iambs. Together with the overloaded syntactic structure, this interplay of (formal) acceleration and deceleration corre-

 See Blades (2004: 39): “the bower as Edenic garden permits the boy a vision of paradise and eternity, existing outside of time”.

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sponds to the effects produced by the sublime, which are both overwhelming and soothing. The latter’s double movement of the sublime can also be seen in the initial excitement of the youth as he bears witness to the overwhelmingly sublime scenery: […] A little while I stood, Breathing with such suppression of the heart As joy delights in; […] (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 21– 23)

His attempt to tame such overflowing impressions – a process that also applies to the perspective of the speaker who retrospectively tries to give form to/archive his former sensory impressions – is formally mirrored by the regularity of the iambic metre (with an inversion in the first foot of line 22). Together with the consonance of approximants (“while”, “with”) and sibilants (such as the fricatives in “Breathing”, “with”, “stood”, “such”, “suppression”, “delights” or the affricates in “joy” and “such”), the act of calmly breathing is onomatopoetically figured. Form and content merge in these passages, unveiling the speaker’s – paradoxical – desire to archive the singularity of his original experience within the poetic depiction of this sublime space. The (formal) excessiveness of the passage eventually culminates in the redundancy of a figura etymologica (“the murmur and the murmuring sound”, the latter being a pleonasm), ultimately testifying to the presence of the sublime(‘s excessive infinity) within this spatial archive. In short, due to the excessive formality and over‐structuring, the depicted spaces not only represent the lost object but they also become it – mere representation yields to an excessive archiving/incorporation, during which the subject strives to timelessly possess the object in its originality and totality. While the sublime spaces depicted in “Nutting” can be generally described as idyllic, the spatial archives in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” rather correspond to the Bakhtinian chronotope of “miraculous world”, i. e. a dreamlike manipulation of spatiotemporal deformations. In contrast to the exclusive naturalness assigned to spaces in “Nutting”, artificial spaces and natural spaces are fused within a complex spatial archive in Coleridge’s poem: on the one hand, its sublime landscape surrounds the pleasure‐dome and, figuratively speaking, houses it. On the other, the pleasure dome itself conveys sublime qualities as it also metafictionally epitomises the present poem/the piece of art. That is, the pleasure dome not only constitutes an archived object within the poem and its landscapes, but it also represents the superordinate archived object (i. e. the sublimity of the land-

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scape as depicted in the poem) and its own archive.¹⁷⁰ Given its multiple unity (i. e. representing both inside and outside, fiction and metafiction, the finite and the infinite, temporality and eternity, the particular and the whole, the archive and the archived object), the pleasure-dome can be best described by turning to Coleridge’s concept of the translucent symbol as outlined in The Statesman’s Manual: a Symbol […] is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative. (Coleridge 2000b: 490)

A closer look at the pleasure-dome’s depiction illustrates this multiple unity: So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And here where gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (Colerdige 2001b: ll. 6 – 11)

First of all, there are striking similarities between the pleasure-dome’s architectural artificiality and the naturalness of the landscape. The dome’s shape (i. e. being girdled with walls and towers) is paralleled by natural forms, such as the gardens’ “sinuous rills or the sacred river’s “meandering […] mazy motion” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 25). This (architectural and natural) interweaving is also mirrored in the poem’s form as can be seen, for example, in the cross-rhyming par As a side note, there are striking similarities between the pleasure‐dome and Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph, in which the eponymic “Aleph” constitutes some kind of sign that encapsulates the whole universe and, therefore, necessarily also itself, with both aspects alluding to the notion of (sublime) infinity: “vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo (Borges 1993: 172). (“I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eys had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon – the unimaginable universe”; Borges 1945: 9).

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allelisms (lines 8 – 9 and 10 – 11) that describe the dome’s surrounding landscape. Nature and architecture are further linked by the consonance of rhotic sounds and the abundant assonance that feature diphthongs in the dome’s depiction (“twice five miles of fertile ground / with walls and towers were girdled round”), which is then extended to the illustration of the surrounding spaces (“gardens bright”). The repetition of diphthongs is eventually replaced with an assonance of monophthongs (“with sinuos rills / Where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree; / And here were forests ancient as the hills, / Enfolding sunny spots of greenery”), which is further highlighted by the iambic extra stress on the otherwise dactylic “greenery”. The coinciding of form and content here seems to produce the effect of the archive becoming the archived object and vice versa, altogether suggesting a high degree of displacement and spectrality. However, the pleasure-dome not only serves as object and its very archive, but it also encapsulates crucial aspects of the sublimity of the surrounding spaces. A “miracle of rare device”, the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 35, 36) combines opposites which can be equally found in the landscape’s depiction.¹⁷¹ In so doing, it also unifies the domesticated, artificial landscape of the poem’s first paragraph with its antithetical untamed landscape in the second paragraph.¹⁷² Further contraries involve, for instance, height/depth (ll. 24– 28), light/darkness (ll. 5 and 11) or life and death (e. g. the “fertile ground” or the “mighty fountain” in lines 6 and 19 vs. the “lifeless ocean” in l. 28, which correspond to the antithesis of the live-giving sun of the dome and its barren, lifeless caves of ice). Moreover, the dome’s enigmatic location “twice five miles of fertile ground” finds its (inverted) spatial counterpart in the “deep romantic chasm” and the “sacred river / Five miles meandering […] Through wood and dale” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 6, 12, 24– 26), both indicating the sublime’s infinity and totality. As Coleridge notes in his letter to John Thelwall, “rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give […] [him] the sense of sublimity or majesty” (Coleridge 1956: 349)¹⁷³ and the number ten constitutes the Py See, in this regard, also Benziger 1962: 27) and Milne (1986: 22).  See Cronin (2005: 266) for the antithetical relation between the poem’s first and second paragraphs.  See, in this regard, also Evans (2010), who summarises Coleridge’s ideas about the sublime. These primarily comprise “awe-inspiring natural features” (2010: 149), such as the rocks, mountains, moving waters mentioned, but also Gothic art and remote, wild regions. Finally, it is the spaces’ transcendental potential, i. e. their capacity to combine the finite with the infinite, which is crucial for the Coleridgean notion of the sublime (2010: 148 – 151). As Northrop Frye (1983: 33, 46 – 47) argues in a more general context, it is especially “in a hidden region, often described in images of underground caves and streams like those of Kubla Khan, that the final unity between man and his nature is most often achieved” (Frye 1983: 33)).

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thagorean number of unity and perfection.¹⁷⁴ The almost inevitable extra stress on “five” breaks the pattern of the iambic tetrameter in the dome’s depiction (“So twice five miles of fertile ground”; Coleridge 2001b: l. 6) and adds a fifth stressed syllable to the line, suggesting further correlation between form and content, between object and archive, as it also draws attention to the number five on a formal level. Finally, the dome’s garden “sunny spots of greenery” indicate the (partial) presence of the divine since the sun can be symbolically related to God and the color green functions in this context as the Christian symbol for (eternal) life. This divine quality is further underlined by several religious/paradisaic allusions¹⁷⁵ such as “the incense-bearing tree” or the “forests ancient as the hills”. These are, in turn, mirrored by the surrounding space’s general characterisation as being “holy and enchanted” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 14), conveying “sublime connotations of something supernatural and sacred” (Evans 2010: 153). The presence of the sublime/divine within the dome’s garden is ultimately highlighted by the iambic stresses imposed on “here” in the parallelisms of lines 8 and 11 (however, note that, in contrast to the Crewe manuscript, the published version just reads “there” and “here” in lines 8 and 11), i. e. the meter additionally emphasises the garden’s spatial deixis. Abstracting from these sublime spaces, we can remark, following Julia Kristeva, that these spatial archives are at root melancholic in that they are also (re‐) constructions of the subject’s most fundamental loss: the separation from the mother. This proves to be especially relevant in the case of Wordsworth, who lost his mother in early childhood and whose yearning for the absolute origin in/via sublime nature can be read as a deferred attempt to re-construct his lost object. In other words, the construction of these sublime spaces via a semiotisation of the suprasegmental level,¹⁷⁶ semantic polyvalence (such as the pleasure-dome’s multiple significations) and their general (excessive) formal overstructuring corresponds to the (partially sublimatory) semiotisation of the symbolic, during which the melancholic subject tries to reconstruct the singularity of the former mother‐child‐dyad (or the Thing). On that note, it is striking that these spaces feature several allusions to the female body. In “Kubla Khan”, for

 See Milne (1986: 23) for this interpretation of the number 10.  See also Schneider (1975: 266 – 267) for the similarities between the spaces in “Kubla Khan” and John Milton’s depiction of paradise in Paradise Lost.  In fact, “’Kubla Khan’ is the most musical of poems” (Youngquist 1999: 896). As Youngquist further argues, “[i]ts musical occurrence, like the somatic memory of opium-eating, articulates excess. In this manner, a Dionysian art affirms the life of loss: it multiples the memorials of its occurrence. Sweet music indeed” (1999: 897). For the musicality of the poem, see also Schneider (1975: 274– 277, 286).

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instance, a “mighty fountain” bursts from a “deep romantic chasm”, “[a]s if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 19, 12, 18), into the sacred river. Not only does this image self‐reflexively mirror the creative process (and respectively the very creation of the present poem),¹⁷⁷ but it can also be metaphorically related to the act of childbirth (i. e. in this reading, earth becomes associated with the mythological notion of mother earth/Gaia). Most striking in this regard, however, is that the sacred river flows into a lifeless ocean. The ocean – a symbol for primeval soup that is generally associated with the archetypical notion of the mother – represents in this context the absolute origin. Together with its attribution of being “lifeless” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 28) it moreover refers to a state before the actual birth, i. e. – in its ultimate consequence – the inanimate, death.¹⁷⁸ Taking into account the metafictional quality of Coleridge’s poem, the (re‐)construction of sublime and Edenic spaces thus further unveils the melancholic subject’s archival desire to return to the unspoilt origin of existence, to a primal state. A similar desire to return to the absolute origin can be seen in the depiction of sublime spaces in “Nutting” (which are explicitly personified as “dearest Maiden”; Wordsworth 2006b: l. 54), yet with stronger sexual connotations.¹⁷⁹ Whereas the shady nook with its “green stones / […] fleeced with moss” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 35 – 36) can be metaphorically associated with the vagina and its pubic hair, the murmuring waters and the “sparkling foam” (Wordsworth 2006b: l. 34) can be related to the womb and its amniotic fluid. Amid this scene, the youth (and the retrospectively archiving speaker) “volouptuous[ly] [..] eyed / The banquet” and “[he] sate / Among the flowers, and with the flowers […] [he; D.K.] played” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 24– 25, 25 – 26). The image of the banquet and the playing with the flowers – emphasised by the lines’ syntactical play with the word “flowers” via a chiasmus and by the fact that these lines are the only (almost full) rhyming couplet in the whole poem – constitutes here a familiar metaphor for the sexual act; a metaphor that we also find, for example, in sonnet 77 of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti in which “Her breast that table was so richly spredd / My thoughts the guests, which would thereon

 See, for example, Benziger (1962: 27) or Milne (1986: 19 – 21).  For the relation between the unconscious desire to return to the mother’s womb and the regressive death drive in Freud’s work, see Stumm/Pritz (2009: 705). See also Schneider (2008: 227– 228) for the complex symbolism of the sea, connoting femininity, origins, regression and death.  For the sexual overtones in “Nutting”, see for example Bloom (1961: 129 – 130), Bigley (1991: 439 – 440) or Neveldine (1996: 660, 665 – 667). As John Blades argues in this context, “The poem essentially symbolizes a first sexual encounter for the pubescent boy. It abounds in sexual and quasi-sexual imagery” (2004: 36).

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have fedd” (Spenser 1989a: l. 13).¹⁸⁰ Robert Burns Neveldine (1996: 665 – 666) is partly right in criticising such readings as “(hetero‐)sexism” (1996: 665) since they largely ignore obvious phallic images such as “the hazels [that] rose / Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 19 – 20). However, I suggest that, analogously to the metapoetical quality of the spaces in “Kubla Khan”, these phallic images reflect the archiving process and the (sexual) pleasure (or even jouissance) the archiving subject experiences by (re‐)constructing the former mother-child-dyad / the Thing, disguised as sublime space(s). This also ties in with the archiving subject’s melancholic disposition insofar as he not only archives the lost object but also becomes/incorporates it in the course of his excessive/narcissistic attachment to it. In short, similar to the pleasure‐dome’s multeity in unity, the sublime spaces in “Nutting” both represent the archived object and the subject’s archiving process, i. e. his archival fever (and archival pleasure). Despite their fundamental melancholic origin, the construction of these spatial archives is therefore also accompanied by a strong feeling of pleasure. The latter arises not only from the subject’s encounter with the sublime but also from his imaginative return to the absolute origin, which is (re‐)constructed and archived in these sublime spaces. Whereas the youth in “Nutting” (and the archiving speaker) feel “blest / With sudden happiness beyond all hope” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 29 – 30) in view of these (re-constructed and archived) sublime spaces, already the very name of the pleasure-dome in “Kubla Khan” exposes the poem’s affective potential. Together with its “translucent” capability – that is, being (simultaneously) an independent sublime object, unifying the landscape’s sublimity, and self-reflexively representing the poem and the underlying archival process – its (re‐)construction over the course of the poem is equated with the speaker’s tasting “honey-dew” and “milk of Paradise” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 53, 54). The image of the “milk of paradise” proves to be especially relevant for the aforesaid since it clearly unveils the strong connection between sublime spaces and the Kristevian concept of melancholy: the glimpse afforded into these paradisiacal sublime spaces provides a taste of the (lost) mother’s milk, further unveiling the speaker’s archival desire to return to the pre-oedipal mother‐child-dyad via its poetic evocation.¹⁸¹ Moreover, the outlined (organic) in-

 Similarly, the nook and bower in “Nutting” are reminiscent of the “bowre of blisse” in Spenser’s Amoretti sonnet 76 (1989b: l. 3).  See, in a slightly different context, also Frye, (1983: 18): “The Romantic redemption myth then becomes a recovery of the original identity. For the sense of an original unity with nature, which being born as a subjective consciousness has broken, the obvious symbol is the mother. The lost paradise becomes really an unborn world, a pre-existent ideal. As a result something of the ancient mother-centered symbolism comes back into poetry.”

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terrelation of form and content in both poems also corresponds to the convergence of the archive and the archived (sublime) object. It is precisely in the moment when the archive (as well as the archiving subject) and the archived object are at their closest that pleasure and the enjoyment of the sublime are at their peak. This even increases to the point where these archiving processes are depicted as sexual acts, as can be seen particularly in Wordsworth’s “Nutting”, but also in “Kubla Khan” whose sexual connotations have been observed by many commentators.¹⁸² *** As has been argued before, however, pleasure and unpleasure are inextricably bound to each other with regard to the sublime as the sublime’s excessiveness – which primarily arises in these examples from its (re‐)construction via hyper signs – is also the source of the death drive’s disintegrative movement, ultimately leading to the loss of the archived object. As such, it is no surprise that “’mid this tumult” – i. e. amid the excessive turmoil of the (re‐)constructed sublime spaces – “Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 29, 29 – 30), figuratively alluding to the death drive’s destructive movement within the archive.¹⁸³ Accordingly, the paradisaic spaces of the first part of the poem turn out to be a false or fallen paradise as many critics have noted: In addition to the aforementioned ambivalence surrounding the sacred river flowing into a lifeless ocean (i. e. into death), the “woman wailing for her demon‐lover” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 16) is interpreted as “Eve after the Fall” (Beer 1985: 241) or as a biblical allusion to Ezekiel’s vision in view of Jerusalem’s vices. Moreover, the dulcimer’s song of “Mount Amara”¹⁸⁴ can be related to the mount Amora, the Hebrew name for Gomorrah.¹⁸⁵ What is suggested through such ambivalence is eventually made concrete in the second part of the poem, which deconstructs the first part (Perry 1998: 134). We now hear the speaker talking about a potential poem (Mine 1986: 23), that he “would build that dome in the air, / That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 46 – 47). This passage clearly refers to the speaker’s lost vision of the preface, which he tried to archive over the course of the poem but rather

 See, for example, Evans (2010: 153 – 154).  See, in this regard, also Milne (1986: 25): “The voices are ‘Ancestral’ because they represent recollection of past losses even as they foretell the one that is about to occur.”  This spelling is according to the Crewe manuscript. The published version reads “Mount Abora”.  See Beer (1985: 239 – 243) and Lindgren (1999: 204 ff.) for these and further allusions to a fallen/ false/lost paradise in “Kubla Khan”.

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receded into the distance (“Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song”; Coleridge 2001b: ll. 42– 43). Put differently, the sublime spaces within the first part of the poem change here into places that the speaker desires to transform into (sublime) spaces. In fact, the vision’s archiving within sublime spaces is multiply deferred:¹⁸⁶ first, the original vision of the preface is re-constructed in the poem simply as “a fragment of a very different character” (Coleridge 2001a: 512). Within the subsequent poem, moreover, the vision’s sublimity is represented by another person’s sublime creation/spatial archive, i. e. Emperor Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome. And the more the poem’s (re‐)construction of this spatial archive of the sublime advances, the more its object vanishes: the second time the speaker describes it, he only refers to “the shadow of the dome of pleasure” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 31), which can be read according to the Neo‐platonic tradition¹⁸⁷ as an entity of the phenomenal world, merely an inferior representation of the ideal (world). By the poem’s end, even this inferior representation has yielded to complete loss and to the desire for a potential poem of this lost object – “[w]holeness is forever deferred, which is exactly what drives the poet mad” (Sedlmayr 2011: 170). These reiterations of the desired object (during which places are transformed into spaces and these spaces are then transformed again into lost places) are paralleled by several formal repetitions throughout its (re‐)construction, such as numerous amounts of alliteration, anaphors, assonance and consonance, and, not least, by the pleasure‐dome’s multeity in unity. Together, these instances of repetition unveil both the speaker’s excessive, melancholic fever to archive and also traces of the death drive beneath these artistic simulacra; that is, the death drive emerges here as excessive/compulsive repetition, ultimately leading to disintegration (as is evidenced by the sublime object’s disappearance over the course of its ongoing reiteration and, not least, by its superordinate generic archive, the fragment). In Wordsworth’s “Nutting”, the (re‐)construction of sublime spaces is likewise followed by their deconstruction. At the height of the youth’s (and the reconstructing speaker’s) luxuriating in the nook’s sublimity, excessive pleasure turns into destructiveness: […] Then up I rose, And dragged to earth both branch, and bough, with crash And merciless ravage: and the shady nook Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,

 See Youngquist (1999: 896 – 897) for a similar reading.  See also Benziger (1962: 27).

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Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up Their quiet being: […] (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 43 – 48)

Similar to “Kubla Khan”, the destruction of the archived object is accompanied on a formal level by numerous repetitions, such as alliterations (“both branch, and bough”) or the tautotes of “and”, which, together with the various run-on lines, creates an accelerating effect that mirrors the destructive frenzy. Consistent with the death drive’s disintegrating movement, the passage eventually ends with an image of stasis/silence and unpleasure (“I felt a sense of pain when I beheld / The silent trees”; Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 52– 53). Critics have interpreted this passage as an example of primary narcissism (e. g. Neveldine 1996: 658), an allegory for the biblical Fall (Westbrook 2001: 132– 135) or, considering its strong sexual connotations, as an instance of post‐coital melancholy in view of the youth’s loss of virginity¹⁸⁸ – omne animal post coitum triste est as the ancient philosophers would have put it. Seen from the perspective of archive fever, however, the destruction of the archived object (both in “Nutting” and “Kubla Khan”) is the last consequence of the speakers’ excessive archival fever since it correlates with the melancholic subject’s inability to detach from the lost object. In other words, throughout the speakers’ oscillation between sublimatory reconstruction/archiving and destructive asymbolia, the object is narcissistically incorporated and its loss continually re‐enacted¹⁸⁹ within its (spatial) archive. Within this process, pleasure and unpleasure are closely intertwined insofar as the unpleasure arising from the object’s destruction is concomitantly the source of the melancholic’s bitter-sweet enjoyment of its loss.¹⁹⁰ Accordingly, both the youth and the speaker in “Nutting” also gain pleasure from the bower’s destruction, “and, unless I now / Confound my present feelings with the past, / Ere from the mutilated bower I turned / Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings” (Wordsworth 2006b: ll. 48 – 51), and the speaker in “Kubla Khan” still indulges in the “honey-dew” and “milk of paradise” (Coleridge 2001b: ll. 53, 54) at the sight of his lost vision. In the case of

 See, for example, Blades (2004: 36 – 38), who reads the poem as an allegory for the youth’s rite of passage, i. e. his initiation into manhood by way of his first sexual encounter.  See, in this regard, also Youngquist (1999: 896): “Not the vision but the vision’s loss is what Coleridge undertakes to imitate”.  See, in a different context, also Frye (1983: 44): “The sense that ecstasy and pain are really the same thing is connected with the fact, just mentioned, that for Romantic mythology the greatest experiences of life originate in a world which is also the world of death and destruction.”

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“Kubla Khan”, the destruction of the archived object furthermore results in a circular ending because it leads anew to a fever to archive (as suggested by the “flashing eyes” and the speaker’s desire to “build that dome in air”; Coleridge 2001b: ll. 50, 46). Altogether, this constitutes a denial of the object’s loss inasmuch as the subject does not (fully) sublimate it via the symbolic but continuously evokes (the gesture of) the loss, further unveiling his excessive and narcissistic fixation on it. These spatial archivings of the sublime, which seek to sublimate the subject’s most archaic loss through an eternal ideal of aesthetic creativity and excess, hence emerge as merely fragile facades – an “erotic simulacrum” carrying “memories of death” (Derrida 1995: 14). Against this backdrop and from the perspective of “archive fever”, it also makes sense that “Nutting” is sometimes grouped with Wordsworth’s Lucy poems: alongside the various traces of Lucy in this poem (see, for example, Thomson 1979), “Nutting” shares similarities with the – as I will show in the following chapter – negative, destructive (archival) quest for the elusive Thing in Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray”, which unveils the melancholic’s ambivalent relishing in the object’s loss and their narcissistic fixation on it.

IV The Subject as Archive 1 Conceiving the Thing: William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” and the Lucy-Poems Wordsworth’s enigmatic ballad “Lucy Gray” is based on a true story he was told by his sister Dorothy, according to which a young girl got lost in a snowstorm at Halifax and drowned (Thomas 1989: 110). Although traditionally excluded from the five so-called “Lucy Poems” (Mark Jones 1995: 9 – 11; Gravil 2003: 157), many critics include the poem within this group due to particular resemblances, such as similarities in tone and mood, and – not least – the theme of the girl’s premature death (Pennington 1926: 316; Noyes 1991: 52– 53; Hartman 1934: 140; Blades 2004: 15; Leadbetter 2011: 104). With respect to the traditional five Lucy poems, Frances Ferguson argues that they represent five different approaches to Lucy, “emerg[ing] from the palimpsest to depict what we may call a Wordsworthian quest for a poetical object” (1977: 178). I want to take up this image of the palimpsest and further show, by using selected examples and selective contextualizations, that these poems likewise share a palimpsestic relation with “Lucy Gray”. In particular, they overlap thematically and structurally, thus not only echoing Lucy’s ghostly presence (her various reconstructions in the different poems) on a formal level but also constituting an intertextual archive of the poem cycle. Drawing on the traditional ballad form, the speaker narrates in “Lucy Gray” the mysterious story of the young girl: at the sight of an upcoming snowstorm, Lucy’s father urges her to go to town and bring her mother back home. Lucy sets out on her quest but disappears amid the storm’s turmoil. On the next day, the parents desperately search for her until they discover her traces in the snow. Following these traces full of hope, they eventually reach the middle of a bridge where her traces end, indicating that she may have drowned. Despite the poem’s apparent simple story and structure, however, the last two stanzas break with the preceding realistic narration¹⁹¹ of Lucy’s death since they suggest

Note: This chapter (ch. IV.1) is a text extract (pp. 131 – 144) from an article I published with Oxford University Press in 2017: Kerler, David. “William Wordsworth’s ’Lucy Gray’ and le mal d’archive: Melancholy, Archives and Spectrality”. English 66:253 (2017): 126 – 144, at 131 – 144. By permission of Oxford University Press.  Benziman (2007: 184– 185) argues that there is a certain tension between the realistic middle part and the poem’s rather mythical beginning and ending. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-005

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that she may still live on – a pivotal moment in which “the poem shares DNA with those customarily grouped together as the ‘Lucy’ cycle” (Leadbetter 2011: 105): Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living Child, That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome Wild. O’er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind. (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 56 – 64)

The motif of seeing plays a crucial role in this poem. While Lucy “never looks behind” – a line that tellingly eye rhymes with “wind” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 62, 64) – the reader is encouraged to take another look at the poem and also participate in the Orphic quest for Lucy.¹⁹² Accordingly, this looking back also refers to the parents’ and speaker’s search for Lucy and is fundamentally characterized by the outlined notion of le mal d’archive: whereas Lucy’s absence is the origin of the speaker’s archive fever, her subsequent re-visioning results in a ghostly presence that can only be discerned by rereading her traces – traces that indicate the archive’s inherent destructiveness and its resulting spectrality. At the core of the poem’s mal d’archive lies a melancholic mood resulting from an omnipresent awareness of loss that can be likewise seen in “Three years she grew”. The latter is characterized by “a sense both of tragic loss and of inevitability” (Gravil 2003: 169), surfacing in personified nature’s initial allusion that “This Child I to myself will take” (Wordsworth 1992b: l. 4) and its fulfilment in the poem’s ending by Lucy’s early death (“Thus Nature spake – The work was done – / […] She died and left to me / […] The memory of what has been, / And never more will be.”; Wordsworth 1992b: ll. 37– 42). “Lucy Gray” shares a similar tone and structure inasmuch as the speaker introduces Lucy’s story with a fatalistic tone that foreshadows her death (“But the sweet face of Lucy Gray / Will never more be seen.”; Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 11– 12), though the sense of her absence is not presented with the same finality as in ‘Three years she grew’ but rather ambiguously. Abounding temporal references (for

 See Fosso (2004: 145) for the different “Orphic quests” in Lucy Gray, namely Lucy’s search for her mother and the parents’, speaker’s and, ultimately, the reader’s search for Lucy; see also Blades (2004: 11– 12).

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example “To-night”, “scarcely afternoon”, “The Minster-clock has just struck two”; Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 13, 18, 19) associate Lucy before she vanishes with temporality and the inexorable flux of time. The latter proves to be particularly significant since Lucy’s death can be read as an allegory for the loss of childhood.¹⁹³ According to such a reading, Lucy’s father represents the symbolic law, forcing Lucy to leave nature and to move to the city – a movement away from childhood’s innocence to the symbolical order of adulthood, epitomized by the town and the mother. Time and spaces are thereby fused to spatial archives that mirror her problematic (she “never reached the town”; Wordsworth 1992a: l. 32) rite of passage: while the first three stanzas depict a natural landscape that evokes harmony, light, and strong colours (“break of day”, “Green” 10; Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 3, 10), the scene changes at the sight of the oncoming storm (of adulthood). Juxtaposed with the former figurative representation of childhood’s simplicity via the construction of an idyllic landscape, the subsequent, predominantly colourless, images of night, storm, and snow in stanzas four through nine point to chaos and death. The notion of a spatial void is created, evoking Lucy’s death and by extension the loss of childhood. This awareness of temporality and finitude eventually causes an archival desire of the lost time, a melancholic harking back: not only are the parents in search of their lost childhood but the poem itself is a manifestation of the speaker’s “romantic gaze” at the latter (Benziman 2007: 188), an act of archiving childhood’s impressions and their personification, Lucy, within the realm of art. The depicted spaces play a crucial role insofar as they function as spatial archives that transcend mere representation by both articulating and, to a certain extent, sublimating the poet’s loss. At the same time, however, this sublimation verges on melancholy as the outlined images of absence that figuratively devour the foregoing idyllic scenery reveal. In other words, they spatially indicate the void of representation that characterizes the melancholic’s yearning for the so-called Thing: “the impression of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good, of something unrepresentable, that perhaps only devouring might represent, or an invocation might point out, but no word could signify” (Kristeva 1989: 13). Spatial mourning and spatial archiving are intertwined in “Lucy Gray” since its spatial structure mirrors the archive’s achronological complexity by constituting both its origin and its effect – a paradoxical movement that also structures the five traditional Lucy poems as a whole in that “the end-point of the cycle is also its beginning-point” (Ferguson 1977: 180). On the one hand, the spaces de-

 For readings that interpret Lucy’s death as an allegory for the loss of childhood see, for example, Blades (2004: 12) and Benziman (2007: 184, 187).

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picted are expressions of a melancholic awareness of loss resulting in an archival desire; on the other hand, they already are themselves places of inscription, sites of memory where the poet hopes to re-experience the lost bliss of childhood. With regard to the latter, we need to take a closer look at the first three stanzas’ semantics of space. The “Wild”, pristine nature together with the images of “[t]he Hare upon the Green”, and “the Fawn at play” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 2, 10, 9) suggest an Edenic world that epitomizes childhood’s innocence as the fawn is a symbol for the harmony of a paradisiac primal state and the colour green refers in a Christian context to the notion of eternal life.¹⁹⁴ Besides being physically located within this depiction of unspoiled nature, Lucy is also metaphorically identified with the natural world (“The sweetest Thing that ever grew / Beside a human door!”; Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 7– 8). This metaphorical identification with nature can be likewise seen in “Strange fits of passion” (where Lucy transcends her being by becoming the moon; Hartman 1971: 23 – 25), “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways” (here, Lucy is equated with “[a] Violet by a mossy Stone”; Wordsworth 1992d: l. 5), and in “Three years she grew”, where she ‘grows’ like Lucy Gray and is addressed by nature as lovely “flower” (Wordsworth 1992b: l. 2). These poems share a similar rhetorical strategy with “Lucy Gray” inasmuch as the lost object of desire is (re)constructed via spatial metaphors that strive to apprehend her unrepresentability and elusiveness. Lucy Gray’s peculiar state of being is further stressed, as the poem’s subtitle (“Or Solitude”) already suggests, by the allusions that she lives in solitude (see, e. g. line 5 “No mate, no comrade Lucy knew”): not only is she isolated from the estranging effects of civilization and adulthood but she also inhabits a different ontological realm of being (Fry 2015: 132), outside the being-with-others (Mitsein) and ultimately “anticipat[ing] the horrible solitude of her death” (Fry 2015: 132). Overall, nature becomes a powerful site of memory in which the lost object is stored or, to be more precise, idealized. As Dominick LaCapra notes with regard to historiography: “[t]he archive as a fetish is a literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian. […] It is a stand-in for the past that brings the mystified experience of the thing itself” (qtd. in Roth 2011a: 181). The same applies to Lucy’s idealization, which primarily arises from her mystification: in addition to her identification with a paradisiac landscape she even seems to overcome death as indicated in the final lines (“Yet some maintain that to this day / She is a living Child; […] And sings a solitary song / That whistles in the wind”; Wordsworth 1992a:

 For the symbolical values of the color green and the fawn see Ajouri (2008) and Grube (2008).

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ll. 56 – 58, 63 – 64). The act of spatially archiving, hence, entails an idealization of the lost object; or, as Harold Bloom puts in it a different though closely related context, “[a]fter [Lucy’s] absorption into Nature (or, more accurately, her absorption of Nature into her) we have a myth” (1961: 222). This fusion of spaces with the lost object of desire is echoed in “I travell’d among unknown Men” (Wordsworth 1983), in which Lucy likewise functions as a genius loci (Fry 2015: 132) by becoming idealized, “pastoral England itself” (Fry 2015: 132). Here, Lucy’s spatial archiving originates from the exiled poet’s nostalgic desire for England in the course of which he strives to “enshrine the spirit of the past for future restoration” (Gravil 2003: 168). It emerges from an archival fever that is directed not only to the past but also to the future in the sense of a possible return of the lost object: The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. […] A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (Derrida 1995: 27– 28)

This nostalgic desire to return to an idealized place of origin via the act of spatial archiving is likewise a crucial motif in “Lucy Gray”, further unveiling the archiving subject’s melancholy in that the idealizing and mystifying depiction of Lucy within nature can be read as an expression of the speaker’s yearning to return to the original place of being.¹⁹⁵ As Derrida notes in this regard, the fever to archive emerges from the “painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin” through the act of archiving (1995: 54, 57). This desire to archive, in turn, can be related in multiple ways to Julia Kristeva’s works on melancholy. According to Kristeva, the yearning for such an absolute origin lies in the heart of melancholia’s roots as well and can be identified with the subject’s most archaic loss: the separation from the mother (Kristeva 1989: 5 – 6, 11– 14). With respect to the work of art, the melancholic disposition may manifest itself in the artist’s attempt to archive the lost origin “through the semiotic dimension of the signifying process” (Lechte 1990: 187), i. e. the subject strives to reconstruct the former mother–child dyad and ultimately the Thing within the realm of the imaginary Lechte: 1990: 187; Suchsland 1992: 117– 124; Kristeva 1989: 97– 100). As Kristeva further explains, this can be achieved aesthetically, for example, through edenic imagery, sublime places, or the evocation of the semiotic through semantic polyvalence,

 See also in a related context Benziman (2007: 18): “[the poem] is taken to reflect the adult speaker’s yearning to escape from the chains of civilization and human society and arrive at a blessed state of solitude in nature, an ideal state embodied by the child figure of Lucy”.

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rhythm, and intonation (Kristeva 1989: 97). Hence, the outlined depiction of edenic nature and the mystification of Lucy can be read as imaginative reconstructions of the lost mother and (as such) as a return to the absolute origin. This regressive movement is also characteristic for the traditional Lucy cycle insofar as each subsequent poem comes nearer to Lucy’s origins until she vanishes from the human sphere in “A slumber did my spirit seal” (Ferguson 1977: 191– 194), where she tellingly only “seem’d a thing” (Wordsworth 1992e: l. 3). The speaker’s melancholic disposition and the resulting archival fever become clearer against the backdrop of Lucy’s peculiar ontological state: beyond representing the loss of childhood, her unrepresentability and mystification make her coincide with the Kristevian notion of the Thing. For, unlike the boy as Wordsworth’s earlier self in “There was a Boy”, Lucy Gray (like the “other” Lucys from the five traditional poems) belongs to a different realm of being making her loss, as Geoffrey Hartman observes, “something unique, and the loss [Wordsworth] feels includes the consciousness that it is unique” (1971: 160). This unnameable uniqueness is approximated in the poem via highly aestheticized spatial images that function as archives or, to put it in Kristeva’s words, a “’container’ seemingly able to secure an uncertain but adequate hold over the Thing” (1989: 14). Moreover, Lucy is frequently described with alliterating fricatives – such as “The sweetest Thing”, “you may see sweet Lucy Gray”, “sings a solitary song” or the approximants in “That whistles in the wind” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 7, 59, 63, 64) – whose airflow onomatopoetically figures her spectral presence and can be related to the semantization of the suprasegmental level which also characterizes the melancholic’s speech (Kristeva 1989: 55). Drawing on Paul de Man’s differentiation between “symbol” and “allegory” (1989: 187– 190), we can finally say that Lucy’s spatial archiving constitutes here a symbolic mode in which signifier and signified, subject and object, seem to merge and to suggest the lost object’s presence in its totality and singularity. And it is precisely this poetic mode which likewise underlies the melancholic’s narcissistic introjection of the lost object, its continuous evocation via the semiotization of the signifying process (“weav[ing] a hypersign around and with the depressive void”; Kristeva 1989: 99) that goes beyond the temporality of the deferred signifier (which, in turn, can be related to de Man’s notion of “allegory”) providing an access to otherwise unreachable realms (Kristeva 1989: 43 – 47, 97– 100; Lechte 1990: 187; de Man 1989: 188 – 189, 206 – 207). In other words, Lucy’s highly aestheticized reconstruction is a projection of the speaker’s melancholic state in the course of which he becomes an archive due to the symbolic incorporation of the lost object.

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Lucy’s presence within absence Notwithstanding Lucy’s presence in the aforementioned instances, the parents’ subsequent search for Lucy ends in nothingness as she seems to have drowned in a river: Then downward from the steep hill’s edge They track’d the foot-marks small; And through the broken hawthorn-hedge, And by the long stone-wall; And then an open field they cross’d: The marks were still the same; They track’d them on, nor ever lost, And to the Bridge they came. They follow’d from the snowy bank Those foot-marks, one by one, Into the middle of the plank —And further there were none. (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 45 – 56)

The parents’ unsuccessful search has to be equally related to the described archival processes, shedding a new light on Lucy’s presence in the poem: the presence which “[t]he print of Lucy’s feet” (Wordsworth 1992a: l. 44) evoked in the preceding line turns out to be just a deferred trace as the anaphoric arrangement of “And” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 47– 49) and its repetition in lines 49 and 55 further suggest. This image can also be related to the Derridean concept of différance, according to which the presence of meaning is constantly deferred due to the signifier’s spatialization and temporalization (Derrida 2005a: 278 – 299; Derrida 2016: 6 – 18; Derrida 2005b: 332– 339). Lucy’s trace is eventually lost in the “middle of the plank” (Wordsworth 1992a: l. 55), which foregrounds her liminality anew since her last trace is in the middle of the bridge, a structure that itself represents a state of transition.¹⁹⁶ Following Paul de Man, we can say that the passage constitutes an allegorical mode, in the course of which Lucy is temporalized through deferred signs. This temporalization can be regarded as a work of mourning insofar as her loss is transposed to the signifier instead of continuously evoking the lost object’s singularity via a symbolic mode (as described earlier with the example of Lucy’s spatial archiving). In contrast to the

 Meisenhelder interprets the bridge as “a vertical connection and the perfect image of Lucy’s etheralization” (1988: 48).

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narcissistic identification with the lost object within the symbolic mode, the allegorical mode “prevents the self from an illusionary identification with the nonself, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self” (de Man 1989: 207). Hence, despite Lucy’s alleged presence in the course of her spatial identification with nature and her re-visioned idealization within the poem, she is also marked by a strong sense of absence – a presence within absence that haunts the poem in all its nuances and ultimately indicates the archive’s spectrality.¹⁹⁷ This can be seen, first and foremost, in the poem’s framing narrative. As James H. Averill observes, the first three stanzas are ambiguous with regard to Lucy’s ontological status since the speaker “chanc’d to see at break of day / The solitary Child” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 3 – 4, 12) but then again asserts that Lucy “[w]ill never more be seen” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 3 – 4, 12) before introducing the parent’s search at dawn: “When exactly the poet saw Lucy Gray is left unclear; the past tense refers ambiguously to time before and after her death” (Averill 1980: 196). The issue is further complicated by the ambiguous final lines (Averill 1980: 196 – 198) according to which “some maintain that to this day” we “may see sweet Lucy Gray” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 57, 59). Thus, the time is clearly out of joint owing to Lucy’s spectrality, which haunts the poem: her presence within absence constitutes both origin and effect of the archive (fever), or, to put it in Derrida’s words, “a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back” (Derrida 2006: 11).¹⁹⁸ Lucy’s ghostly presence is further stressed by abounding images of liminality from the temporal location of the first and last part in twilight (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 3, 37) – i. e. the intermediary state between day and night – through to repeated references to bridges (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 39, 52, 55),¹⁹⁹ which are further complemented by images of marginality (such as “the steep hill’s edge”, “the broken hawthorn hedge”, or the “long stone-wall”; Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 45, 47, 48). In the poem’s thematic and structural centre eventually lies the haunting image of Lucy’s traces in the snow, which are later discovered by her parents: “[h]er feet disperse the powd’ry snow / That rises up like smoke” (Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 27– 28). On the one hand, the snow can be read as a

 This movement from presence to absence within the very act of archiving her is equally characteristic for the traditional Lucy cycle insofar as “[t]hrough the course of these poems, Lucy is repeatedly and ever more decisively traced out of existence” (Ferguson 1977: 174).  For the notion of Lucy Gray being a revenant, see also Sandy (2013: 35).  See also Averill, who interprets the bridge as a symbol for “the separation of two worlds, the living and the dead” (1980: 197).

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metaphor for writing and represents together with Lucy’s footprints metafictionally her material presence in the poem, the process of aesthetically archiving her via the act of writing. On the other hand, the subsequent simile together with the iambic emphases on “up” and “smoke” signal Lucy’s and writing’s ephemeral character by alluding to their dissolution. These subtle allusions to the precarious materiality of the archiving medium, moreover, echo significant cultural developments of the age, namely the emergence of a “new age of paper” (Stauffer 2006: para. 8). As Andrew Stauffer argues in this context, “[f]or the Romantics, the burgeoning culture of print led to two related archival troubles: the fragility of the material and the vast quantities of it” (Stauffer 2006: para. 14). The related anxieties surface, for instance, in the recurring motifs of “scattered leaves” in many of Shelley’s and Keats’s works (Stauffer 2006: para. 1– 17), or in the said image of Lucy’s fleeting (foot)prints. Accordingly, even her written, material presence in the poem is just a vanishing trace – an image that is completed by the deferred search of the parents. Read as Lucy’s textual impression, “[t]he print of Lucy’s feet” (Wordsworth 1992a: l. 44) extend the parents’ and the speaker’s search for Lucy to the meta‐level of the poem.²⁰⁰ The parents’ house (together with their attempt to bring Lucy back) thus constitutes a powerful spatial metaphor for the poem’s archival processes since the “house” refers both etymologically and figuratively to the poem as archive. As Derrida observes in this regard, the word archive derives from the Greek arkhaion: “initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (Derrida 1995: 9). Similar to the archival act, using a certain genre also encompasses an exercise of the so-called “archontic power”, i. e. “the functions of unification, of identification, of classification” (Derrida 1995: 10). Accordingly, it is the poem that frames or, figuratively speaking, “houses” the lost object desired and, through this, grafts its logic and structures (such as the conventions of Romantic aesthetics, genre and language itself) on to the respective object. Throughout the five traditional Lucy poems, Wordsworth draws on various genres in order to approach Lucy’s unrepresentability aesthetically, although none of these narrative frames seems to be able to archive Lucy in her originality fully, to capture her essence. As Ferguson shows, the five poems feature and blend elements of ballad, romance (e. g. “Strange fits of passion”), love poetry (e. g. the motif of flowers in “Three years she grew” and “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways”, or

 See Averill (1980: 196), who relates the pun on print to the reader: “The spying by the reader is mirrored by the parents’ spying the footprint. This ‘print’, implicitly a pun on the print of words, is a ‘sight’ which will serve both parents and reader ‘for a guide’.”

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Lucy’s comparison with a rose in “Strange fits of passion” [Wordsworth 1992c: ll. 5 – 6]), and epitaphs (e. g. “I travell’d among unknown Men” but also the marriage turned into a funeral in “Three years she grew”), altogether constituting a “failed quest” (Ferguson 1977: 194) in that the poet has to recognize the intangibility of his object of desire (Ferguson 1977: 175 – 176, 181– 182, 185, 188, 193 – 194). A palimpsest of these poems, “Lucy Gray” echoes both thematic and formal features of the said genres. With its narrator, four-line stanzas and cross rhymes, the poem’s macrostructure follows the conventions of the ballad form. From a thematic point of view, Lucy Gray’s tragic incident can be ascribed to the conventions of the ballad, whereas her mysteriousness and idealization are typical elements of romance. Furthermore, the parents’ and the narrator’s search for Lucy Gray complies with the quest motif, which likewise constitutes a central structuring element of the genre of romance. This quest motif, in turn, is entangled with the epitaphic beginning of the poem emphasizing Lucy’s absence (“But the sweet face of Lucy Gray / Will never more be seen” Wordsworth 1992a: ll. 11– 12): not only is it the triggering incident for the said quest but it also places the poem within the tradition of the elegy. As a result, both the quest for Lucy and the elegiac lament she prompts make the poem inhabit a liminal state between mourning and melancholia, further unveiling the archive’s paradoxical nature. On the one hand, Lucy Gray is cast into narrative poetry with the help of the generic traditions of the ballad and romance resulting in a temporalization of the object, which can be described with Paul de Man as an essential mode of allegory surfacing “in the tendency of the language toward narrative” (1989: 225). This temporalization of the lost object likewise constitutes a central element in the genre of elegy in that its work of mourning – or the “quest” of the mourner – consists in a sublimation of the lost object by replacing it with another sign (Sacks 1985: 1– 2, 7– 8). As such, the libidinal attachment is thus deferred onto another object/sign since, following Paul de Man, “[t]he meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can […] consist only in the repetition […] of a previous sign with which it can never coincide” (de Man 1989: 207). Consistent with the conventions of the elegy, the numerous instances of repetition in “Lucy Gray” (such as the aforementioned anaphoras, the cross-rhymed stanzas or instances of verbal repetition), her repetition within various genres and, not least, within the other Lucy poems can be read, moreover, as a ceremonial structure that helps to exorcize the haunting lost object by separating it from the living.²⁰¹ In other words, the use of these genre elements as archives entails an allegorical

 See Sacks (1985: 19 – 20, 23) for the mentioned conventions of the elegy.

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mode through which the lost object is put into a temporal structure, sublimated via its repetition in deferred signs. On the other hand, this negation of the loss via sublimation is at the same time marked by a “denial of negation”, the lost object is not fully transposed to the signifier but narcissistically incorporated instead.²⁰² This becomes evident in Lucy’s indeterminacy and unrepresentability, which can be related to the Kristevian notion of the Thing, i. e. the lost object’s representational void that characterizes the melancholic’s pathological disposition. If at all, this unrepresentability can be adumbrated through the “semiotic dimension of the signifying process” (Lechte 1990: 187), as for example manifested in Lucy’s spatial archiving. Here, Lucy’s identification with an idealized landscape constitutes, following Paul de Man, a symbolic mode in which subject and object seem to merge – a narcissistic incorporation of the lost object, in the course of which the subject not only becomes an archive but also resorts to genre conventions of love poetry (such as Lucy’s identification with idealized nature) as archives or “container” (Kristeva 1989: 14). Seen from the structural conventions of the elegy, “Lucy Gray” hence constitutes a failed quest since the lost object is not fully substituted by other signs. The poem therefore complies with Mark Sandy’s general observation that “Wordsworth’s elegiac poetry is haunted by the darker possibility that those signs of nature, ghostly figures, and half-formed or ruined structures that populate the landscape are themselves no more than blank, indecipherable, inarticulate epitaphs” (Sandy 2013: 46). Tellingly, the elegy’s trope of light as an image of the mourner’s successful work of mourning (Sacks 1985: 33 – 34) reappears ambivalent in the very figure of Lucy Gray. Her name is an almost oxymoron as Lucy etymologically derives from Latin lux (Blades 2004: 12) and Gray also refers to the colour grey, the latter being an intermediary colour between white and black. In addition to representing an existential intermediary state between life and death, the colour grey further evokes decay and death (Kurz 2008: 137). Together with the previous observations, Lucy Gray’s very name thus exposes the destructive forces working within the poem, namely an archival act in which the lost object is both re- and deconstructed. As a result, Lucy Gray cannot be sublimated successfully and remains the melancholy Thing, her paradoxical combination of colours, thereby almost foreshadowing Julia Kristeva’s definition of the phenomenon: “the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time” (Kristeva 1989: 13).

 See Kristeva (1989: 40 – 54) for the concept of “denial of negation”.

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Conclusion Lucy’s archiving turns out to be an ambivalent endeavour, making the poem’s melancholic mood both archive fever’s origin and outcome. Firstly, it is an expression of a sense of loss – that is, the loss of Lucy and, by extension, of childhood – which kindles the speaker’s fever to archive. The latter appears in the attempts to archive the lost object spatially, thereby indicating that Lucy not only represents the loss of childhood but, more fundamentally, the loss of the mother as manifested in the melancholic’s yearning for the so-called Thing. Secondly, the poem’s melancholic mood is at the same time the effect of the archive’s destructive forces, a melancholic awareness arising from the fact that the lost object can never be fully archived and possessed. For though Lucy is – at least ephemerally – present in the different archives, she is equally marked by a strong sense of absence. The aesthetic re-visioning of Lucy via the various acts of archiving oscillates between presence and absence. All her archives – the imagined spaces, the lyrical I’s psychology and the poem itself – are characterized by a profound liminality. The latter thereby comprises the poem’s framing and embedded narrative and also extends to the respective semantic, lexical, and phonetic layers. Taken together, all these elements constitute the archive as such and testify to its spectral structure of storage and effacement. This spectral structure also extends to the notion of the genre as archive. Not only does it provide a structural and semantic framework into which the lost object is inscribed but it also constitutes an instance of intertextuality in the course of which a specific generic tradition is archived. In fact, British Romanticism is not a “movement ‘beyond genre’” (Duff 2009: 201) but rather a creative and selfaware interplay of tradition and innovation (Duff 2009; Curran 1986). In this context, the merging of the various generic traditions (romance, ballad, epitaph, elegy, and love poetry) in “Lucy Gray” can be further related to the notion of archive fever. On the one hand, it corresponds to an archival fever to possess the original by laying bare its archaic quality: “[t]o use a literary genre was to render perceptible the sediment layers, to build up across time, which constitute that genre; to renew […] the ‘archaic elements’ that lay buried within” (Duff 2009: 145). On the other hand, Wordsworth’s rereading of these genres – i. e. their modification, negation, and combination – follows the archive’s characteristic double movement of storage and effacement so that the mentioned generic traditions are both present and absent in the poem. For it is the act of iteration, citing and thus archiving a specific genre (Derrida 1980: 57– 58), which results in a genre’s “impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence” (Derrida 1980: 57).

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Finally, the described archives are haunted by the eponymous figure of Lucy Gray. Both constituting the poem’s origin and (lost) object, Lucy epitomizes archive fever’s spectral structure of storage and destruction by being “something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing” (Derrida 2006: 5). In this context, we need to take up again the motive of seeing in the poem’s final lines. An allusion to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it becomes clear why Lucy “never looks behind” (Wordsworth 1992a: l. 62): representing the lost absolute origin (the melancholic Thing), Lucy inhabits a realm beyond temporality and does not have to look back. In contrast, her parents and the speaker increasingly do, as the embedded story of the parent’s feverish search and the speaker’s compulsive repetition of the search, through his imaginative reconstructions of Lucy, reveal. As the myth suggests, however, this gazing is linked to the loss of the desired object – an ambivalent double movement of retrieval and effacement that equally marks Lucy’s archiving and adds to her mythopoetic idealization. Seen from the speaker’s perspective, this double movement unveils the archiving subject’s fundamental melancholic disposition: the perpetual construction and deconstruction of Lucy over the course of the poem (and not least the Lucy cycle), her spectral oscillation between the presence and absence, corresponds to the melancholic’s narcissistic and excessive fixation on the lost object. Her loss is compulsively re-enacted within the poet’s subjectivity surfacing in the difference between symbolic and allegorical mode. By this “faked spectacle of the excessive, superfluous mourning” (Žižek 2000: 661) the subject – paradoxically – possesses an object that “is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack” (Žižek 2000: 660), an object that was already lost from the beginning (Žižek 2000: 658 – 663). Hence, the “failed quest” (Ferguson 1977: 194) for the lost object, which overall characterizes the analysed archival acts and corresponds to the “archive’s fever”, actually is a successful quest for the melancholic inasmuch the latter obtains an ambivalent pleasure arising from the archived object’s presence within its absence.

2 Archiving Melancholia: John Keats’s Odes In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats on the 21 September 1819, two days after he finished the last and concluding of his major odes, “To Autumn”,

Note: Parts of this chapter (ch. IV.2) were previously published by De Gruyter: Kerler, David. “Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats”. Anglia 138:3 (2020): 355 – 383.

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John Keats reflects on a “fever” that he hopes to have exorcised but that still seems to haunt him: Some think I have lost that poetic ardour and fire ‘tis said I once had—the fact is perhaps I have: but instead of that I hope I shall substitute a more thoughtful and quiet power. I am more frequently, now, contented to read and think—but now & then, haunted with ambitious thoughts. Qui[e]ter in my pulse, improved in my digestion; exerting myself against vexing speculations—scarcely content to write the best verses for the fever they leave behind. I want to compose without this fever. I hope I one day shall. (Keats 1958b: 209)

Keats’s letter has given rise to many critics’ verdict on “To Autumn”, taking the position that the poem marks a decisive change in the poet’s way of coping with his melancholic mood, i. e. offering “feelings of fulfilment […] completely free of mystification, whish‐fulfillment, or tendentiousness of any kind” (Bracher 1990: 633; see also Elizabeth Jones 1995: 362– 363). For Harold Bloom, “To Autumn” makes us “feel that we might be at the end of tragedy or epic, having read only a short ode” (2004: 23); or to put it in psychoanalytical terms, a sense of fulfilment that “derives from the repositioning of death within the Imaginary and Symbolic orders” (Bracher 1990: 639) – a process that is seen as determinative for all his major odes and to reach its ultimate goal in “To Autumn”. Yet Keats’s observation regarding his changed state of mind, an increase in pensiveness and “quiet power”, also unveils melancholia’s tendency towards stasis and asymbolia (i. e. the workings of the death drive) – a stillness that is both interrupted and nourished by “ambitious thoughts” that kindle a certain “fever” in him, similar to that of Coleridge’s ancient mariner: at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns (Coleridge 2000a: ll. 582– 585)

In what follows, I suggest that Keats’s odes – especially “To Autumn” – elude successful sublimation and rather attest to the poet’s fundamental melancholic disposition, surfacing with a multi-layered archival fever, which, alongside its destructive dimensions, also results in a noticeable creativity. Keats’s “fever” that still haunts him, his “ambitious thoughts”, may originate from various experiences of loss, personal and historical. On the one hand, they can be found amid a general loss of faith in the soothing meta-narrative of religion, which he tries to replace with notions of the sublime and transcendence in art

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(Bohm 2007: 2– 4; Sharp 1979) – a general tendency of the British Romantics which we have also seen with the previous discussion on sublime spaces as archives. On the other hand, psychoanalytical approaches to Keats’s work stress the idea that his initial loss of the mother (in the sense of the loss of the mother-child-dyad) was “reduplicated by his mother’s remarriage after his father’s death, thus reawakening the young poet’s original feeling of bereavement” (Fournier 2010: 89; see also Wolfson [1985: 75– 76] and La Cassagnere 2008 for a broader context regarding Keats’s relation to his mother). In addition to this bereavement, Keats also suffered from the experience of financial troubles, a consuming infatuation with Fanny Brawne and the death of his brother, Thomas, from tuberculosis in 1818. All of these factors contributed to an awareness and anxiety surrounding existential and transcendental loss, ²⁰³ an unnameable void that is, as I shall contend, ultimately rooted in the Kristevian notion of the Thing. In this regard, a further letter to George and Georgiana (September 17th, 1819) turns out to be revealing: My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar – I am a weaver boy to them – a Tragedy would lift me out of this mess. And mess it is as far as it regards our Pockets – But be not cast down any more than I am. I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. (Keats 1958b: 186)

Not only does Keats here express his fears regarding his unacknowledged genius – an anxiety about falling into oblivion that also results in an archival fever, as I will argue below – but also the severity of a sense of loss that may point beyond the realm of mere empirical experience (“I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones”). Against this backdrop, I shall argue that Keats’s oeuvre and aesthetics are marked by his attempts to articulate and understanding his melancholic void. His odes are haunted by a feverish, compulsive desire to incorporate the melancholy Thing, in the course of which the subject itself becomes an archive of this fundamental loss. Keats’s odes both (re‐)enact these processes and constitute a metareflection on them, whereby he conceives of the phenomenon of melancholy in terms of the archive. In this sense, his odes are – loosely drawing on Geoffrey Hartman’s (1987) argument regarding “To Autumn” and the idea of impersonality – deeply “ideological” (Hartman 1987: 45; see also 45 – 47) inasmuch as they bear numerous discursive and material traces related to the contemporary flourishing of archives and archival practices, thereby re-

 See also Bohm (2007: 2): “The poems and letters of John Keats provide a vivid account of the intense, complex struggle to replace with hope the bleakness of a world deprived of the consolation of faith.”

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vealing their essential “involvement in social and historical vision” (Hartman 1987: 47). *** An avid museumgoer, John Keats has been repeatedly described as a “museum poet par excellence” (Rovee 2008: 994), his work reflecting the ideology of the museum insofar as he also strives to timelessly conserve material objects that are considered to be artefacts that possess high cultural value (first and foremost, Greek art) (Behrendt 2005: 8 – 9; Elizabeth Jones 1995: 346; Phinney 1991: 213). The museum (and, in a wider sense, the poet), therefore, fulfils the archive’s classificatory functions of collecting, selecting, of de- and re-contextualising (see also Rovee 2008: 996; Phinney 1991: 212), and ultimately controlling access to the object, thereby mediating between the private and the public in a similar fashion to the “superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (Derrida 1995: 9). In so doing, the museum acquires an almost mystic aura, which Keats consequently evokes “as a site not of resonance but of wonder […], enchanted by and desirous of objects he can see and reach but cannot touch” (Rovee 2008: 1015). Biographers emphasise his many, almost compulsive, visits to the Elgin marbles in the British Museum (Phinney 1991: 216), whose uniqueness he tries to capture in his sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), where the mystic aura previously mentioned arises from the poet’s fetishising gaze: […] Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. (Keats 2000b: ll. 9 – 14)

Keats’s frequent visits to the museum and his poetic appropriation of its objects are echoed by the archival spirit of the age; that is, a “phase of cultural appropriation” (Elizabeth Jones 1995: 343; see also Phinney 1991: 213) that not only comprises public museums and libraries but also extends to a bibliomania within extensive private book collections (Behrendt 2005: 8 – 9). Notwithstanding these well‐documented cases of a literal archival fever, however, John Keats’s “museal poetics” (Rovee 2008: 1015) have not yet been considered under the notion of archive fever and its relation to the phenomenon of melancholia: in par-

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ticular, to what extent do the prevalent discourses on collecting/archiving and their material manifestations determine the melancholic disposition displayed/enacted in Keats’s odes, his aesthetics and ultimately his conception of the phenomenon itself? To answer these questions, we must first consider “Ode on Melancholy”. The poem takes a central position in Keats’s major odes because it both stages the poet’s melancholic bitter-sweet enjoyment and explicitly reflects upon the phenomenon. It thereby reveals numerous discursive traces pertaining to the notion of the archive (fever) and overall, it functions as an explanatory metatext for itself and the other odes. From the very beginning, the first stanza alludes to the archiving process on various levels: No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries; For shade to shade will come to drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. (Keats 2000a: ll. 1– 10)

Keats’s gathering of classical images and topoi associated with the phenomenon of melancholia (such as suicidal tendencies, drugs, forgetting or death) is owing to his famous predecessors and their works, namely John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638) and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (Haverkamp 1990: 697– 700; Bate 1987: 26), the latter forming an impressive archive of various texts on melancholy that spans almost two thousand years and comprises over 6000 footnotes. What Keats displays aesthetically through these numerous intertextual allusions constitutes a structuring principle for the other odes and gestures towards melancholia’s relation to archive fever; that is, an excessive desire to possess the (lost) object as indirectly thematised via the act of gathering in the first stanza (thus intertextually archiving melancholia’s discursive origins). In other words, already evident in the ode’s strophe, Keats’s reflection on melancholia constitutes a displaced symptom of the phenomenon itself while also disclosing the phenomenon’s relation to the archival act. The act of collecting also plays a central role among his other odes. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, for example, Keats establishes an excessive catalogue of sensory impressions in the course of his imaginary identification with the nightin-

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gale – i. e. the “most melancholy” (Milton 1970: l. 62) bird not just since John Milton’s “Il Penseroso” – thus implicitly associating melancholia with the act of excessive gathering. In “To Autumn”, moreover, the central metaphor of the strophe and antistrophe is – tellingly – that of harvesting: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. (Keats 2000c: ll. 1– 11)

The strophe delights in the enumeration of its objects²⁰⁴ that set the stage for the act of harvesting in the antistrophe, hence revealing the melancholic subject’s compulsion to collect/archive. This is additionally suggested on a formal level via the excessive repetition and paraphrasing of the core metaphor, thus structurally echoing the enumeration of melancholia’s various images/topoi in the strophe of the “Ode on Melancholy”. Moreover, it also underlines the melancholic’s desire to possess the (lost) object in its totality and completeness as figuratively suggested by the repeated emphases on the ripeness of the fruit (such as “mellow fruitfulness”; “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”; “swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / with a sweet kernel”; “summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells” etc.; Keats 2000c: ll. 1, 6, 7– 8, 11). This extended metaphor is eventually completed in the ode’s antistrophe: the season of autumn – which, in turn, constitutes a melancholic topoi – is directly linked to the act of gathering (e. g. via its personification in “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? / […] Thee sitting careless on a granary floor”; Keats 2000c: ll. 12– 14) and is further explicated with a concluding simile: “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook” (Keats 2000c: ll. 19 – 20). Finally, the rhetoric and logic of collecting/archiving are most notably expressed in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and through the treatment of its material object, the urn. On the one hand, the museum decontextualises its ancient artefacts by extracting them from their former historical and cultural contexts, turning  See also Vendler (1983: 195): “The constitutive trope of the ode is enumeration”.

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them into objects of art that inspire Keats (here: a Greek urn). On the other hand, Keats de- and recontextualises this object anew over the course of its ekphrastic re-presentation (Phinney 1991: 212; Behrendt 2005: 8; Rovee 2008: 996). That is, he subjects the urn to the fetishising “male gaze of the collector” (Behrendt 2005: 5) and enshrines it as a “museum piece” (Behrendt 2005: 6) within the present poem, which functions as a museum or, indeed, as an archive (Behrendt 2005: 5 – 8; Rovee 2008: 996). In a further step, the poem becomes itself a document – or even an artefact, i. e. Keats’s poetic urn as a “collector’s piece” (Behrendt 2005: 8) – within another archive, namely the Annals of Fine Arts (January 1820), an antiquarian journal where the poem is published (Behrendt 2005: 8; Elizabeth Jones 1995: 346). In short, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” represents both an effect as well as a continuation of the ideology of the museum. In this way, the poem reveals (similar to Lord Byron’s archival anxiety made evident in “On Leaving Newstead Abbey”) Keats’s desire to construct his own archive in the face of his fear of passing into oblivion. Keats’s anxiety here manifests in the ode’s glimpse into the past, which is also a confrontation with a desired future in that Keats strives to inscribe “himself into the canon of great writers, the literary equivalent of the museum” (Phinney 1991: 217), just as he eternalises the urn (Phinney 1991: 217– 218). Turning back to the intratextual level of the poem, the rhetoric of collecting/archiving surfaces again with the questions posed by the poet as he addresses the urn: […] What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? […] Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? (Keats 2000d: ll. 5 – 10, 31– 37)

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Keats’s numerous questions, which make enquiries about the urn’s cultural and spatiotemporal origins, are, in fact, archaeological ones (Phinney 1991: 223). They not only unveil the extent to which the poem is indebted to the logic and rhetoric of the archive but they also disclose Keats’s obsession with origins, which is, as I will show in detail at a later point, closely linked to the concepts of archive fever and melancholia in that it constitutes a displaced form of the melancholic’s desire to return to the absolute origin via the act of archiving. Together with the discursive links to contemporary preoccupations with archives, the examples shown that relate to collecting are relevant for the speaker’s melancholic disposition in the odes insofar as they hint at his desire to incorporate the lost object. This becomes eminently clear in the antistrophe of “Ode on Melancholy”, which accordingly continues and concretises the acts of gathering in the preceding strophe: But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, […] Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (Keats 2000a: ll. 11– 12, 19 – 20)

Opposed to a sublimation of the lost object, i. e. a denial of its loss via its displacement to the symbolic, the speaker suggests that the/his melancholic void (the Thing) should be introjected and preserved (“Emprison her soft hand”). As a consequence, the melancholic denies the negation of the object’s loss and continuously evokes it within his psychic apparatus instead (Kristeva 1989: 40 – 47, 60 – 61). In other words, the subject itself becomes an archive of the lost object. This process of incorporation, in turn, is reflected metapoetically with the help of various images of repositories that function as archives. Accordingly, Keats stresses in the epode that “in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine” (Keats 2000a: ll 25 – 26), thus linking the melancholic disposition with the idea of preservation within a building, an archive. In “Ode to Psyche”, as another example, the poet strives to “build a fane / In some untrodden region of [his] mind”, to be “[a] shrine, [a] grove, [an] oracle” (Keats 2000e: l. 50 – 51, 48) for the figure of Psyche – a mythological (mother) figure that represents for Keats an unspeakable totality (like Greek art in general) and whose feverish attempt to archive can be related to the lost Thing. These examples reveal further discursive traces to the notion of the archive in Keats’s conception of the phenomenon of melancholia, and

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additionally function as metaphors for the melancholic’s psyche: to the same extent that the urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is both an object within the poem and a metaphor for the poem itself/the speaker’s subjectivity, the spatial images of shrines, temples or fanes self-reflexively point to the archiving subject’s consciousness. This is also implied in the ambivalent title of “Ode to Psyche” – referring to both the mythological character and the poet’s mind (Bloom 2004: 3 – 4; Bloom 1987: 41– 44) – and made concrete in the last stanza: Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! (Keats 2000e: ll. 50 – 67)

Apart from the metaphorical identification of the human brain with vegetation, the numerous images of trees (such as “branched thoughts” and “pines”, or the “forest boughs” and “whisp’ring roof / Of leaves” that likewise enclose Psyche in the preceding stanzas; Keats 2000e: ll.10 – 11, 38) also refer metonymically to paper/writing and, consequently, to the present poem and the materiality of its archiving medium. Put differently, Keats’s attempt at building a shrine for the belated goddess²⁰⁵ is also an attempt to inscribe himself into the archive of Psyche’s mythological sources and to modify it accordingly. Overall, the metatexts of these odes suggest diverse interrelations between notions of the archive and the (speaker’s) melancholic disposition. A central aspect involves the melancholic’s feverish desire to possess/introject the (lost) object. This process is conceived in terms of (prevalent discourses on) the archive,  See Aske (1987: 112) for Psyche’s ambivalent status as a parergonal figure.

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manifesting itself in instances of gathering/collecting and various images of repositories. What is metapoetically addressed in these examples constitutes a major structural principle among all six odes. Similar to the Lucy‐Poems that were previously discussed, the odes all revolve around the melancholic’s attempt to archive the Thing, however, Keats tries to get an additional hold over the Thing’s elusiveness by reflecting upon his melancholic state, thus attaining a meta‐perspective. Through this perspective, Keats’s odes (re)produce melancholia’s characteristic and paradoxical structure of unavailable availability. Put differently, they constitute sublimatory-symbolic displacements that alternate with melancholic asymbolia, ultimately developing the archive’s spectrality. Accordingly, the mentioned repositories – be it the temple and shrine in “Ode on Melancholy”, the fane and shrine in “Ode to Psyche”, or the urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” – depict places of idealisation that are also (implicitly or explicitly) associated with/related to death. They therefore not only reflect the archive’s paradoxical structure of storage and effacement (in a wider sense also gesturing to the museum, whose destructiveness has been underlined by Quatremère and Marinetti and Adorno in succession; Rovee 2008: 999), but also echo the ambivalent nature of the melancholic’s introjection of the Thing. That is, as I will show hereinafter, it constitutes an archival act where the loss of the object is re-enacted, the negation of its loss denied, ultimately making the subject a crypt for the Thing: The dead language they [the melancholic; D.K.] speak, which foreshadows their suicide, conceals a Thing buried alive. The latter, however, will not be translated in order that it not be betrayed; it shall remain walled up within the crypt of the inexpressible affect, anally harnessed, with no way out. (Kristeva 1989: 53)

*** How, then, does the melancholic subject become an archive of its lost object (the Thing), and how can this process be analysed systematically within a literary text? For this purpose, we need to reconsider Julia Kristeva’s thoughts on the phenomenon of melancholia. Unable to mourn for the lost object, i. e. unable to sublimate its primary affective inscriptions by symbolic (re‐)constructions, the melancholic preserves its unnameable singularity and his affective attachment to it instead (denial of negation). This inability to mourn due to the Thing’s narcissistic introjection, its archiving, results in the “setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial […] language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier” (Kristeva 1989: 44). In particular, to the same extent that the melancholic’s inner self dies (see also in this regard Sigmund

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Freud’s remark that the object-loss is transformed in melancholia into an egoloss²⁰⁶), his language is also marked by a fundamental disruption of signifier, referent and drive-related (semiotic) inscriptions. Through the denial of symbolic sublimation, the melancholic believes to preserve the Thing, or rather the depressive affect of its loss: “Depressed speech, built up with absurd signs, slackened, scattered, checked sequences, conveys the collapse of meaning into the unnameable where it founders, inaccessible and delightful, to the benefit of affective value retrieved to the Thing” (Kristeva 1989: 52). As a result, the melancholic establishes a “narcissistic libidinal homeostasis” (Kristeva 1989: 48) through these split signifiers and becomes an archive, a “crypt” (Kristeva 1989: 53), for the Thing. The melancholic subject’s precarious identity which arises from this process can be thereby described as a “living death” (Kristeva 1989: 4) – an oxymoronic quality that is grounded in the ambivalent nature of the split signifiers: on the one hand, they attest to the melancholic’s denial of negation, i. e. the inability to construct stable signification; on the other hand, they bear traces of the lost object’s primary impressions precisely because of their rupture, ultimately providing an affective‐semiotic hold over the unnameable Thing (Kristeva 1989: 43 – 44, 46 – 66). The melancholic’s introjection of the lost object, thus, is fundamentally marked by the ambivalent nature of the archival act, namely by the feverish and excessive attachment to the object, and by the spectral simultaneity of storage and effacement. In John Keats’s odes, the asymbolic side of the melancolic’s denial of negation can be traced (1) in images of death and absence, (2) a loss of reference, and (3) in instances of stasis and silence, altogether suggesting the breakdown of signification/symbolic sublimation. A starting point for this reading is the “Ode on Indolence”, which, according to Helen Vendler, is “the seminal poem for the other great odes” (1987: 93) as it introduces many of their themes and motives. Beyond numerous readings that focus on the poem’s biographical context (i. e. the young artist reflecting on love, ambition and his career as an aspiring poet), I claim that Keats’s “Ode on Indolence” is a seminal text insofar as it both stages a melancholic denial of symbolic sublimation and self‐reflexively discusses the phenomenon, thereby providing the pretext for the other odes’ (compulsive) variation on the theme: a place of self-reflection,²⁰⁷ Keats explores his melancholic mood in this ode and strives to maintain a state of lethargy/indolence. The latter has been a characteristic symptom of  See Freud (1982: 203 – 207) and Kristeva (1989: 18 – 21), who relates this observation to the notion of the Thing.  See also Bode (2008: 212– 213), who argues that Keats’s odes are monologues, in which the self discursively explores its condition in relation to a non-self.

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the melancholic disposition from its early association with acedia (Cassian) and the viscous black bile (Radden 2000: 69 – 78; Galen 2003: 115; Galenus 1953: 203 – 213) through to Robert Burton (1989: 238 – 245), Sigmund Freud or in Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving “Melencolia I” (1514) with its pensive female figure – an emotionlessness that can be traced back to the Kristevian denial of negation, thereby constituting the depressive affect. Throughout the “Ode on Indolence” the lyrical I relishes in a peculiar mood, a “honied indolence” (Keats 2000 g: l. 37): The blissful cloud of summer-indolence Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less; Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower: (Keats 2000 g: ll. 16 – 18)

Neither feeling pain nor pleasure, the speaker’s disposition is characterised by an absence of feeling and by reduced affective resonance. The emphasis on the decelerating pulse together with further allusions to numbness (such as the “drowsy hour” or “drowsy noons”; Keats 2000 g: ll. 15, 36) are symptomatic of the speaker’s psychomotor retardation, indicating processes of depersonalisation and ego loss.²⁰⁸ This complies with Julia Kristeva’s observation that the melancholic’s subjective identity is marked by feelings of emptiness and worthlessness (Kristeva 1989: 48), implying the sense of a self‐destructiveness that “exhaust[s] any possibility of an object” (Kristeva 1989: 48). Such a mood of lethargic nothingness verging on death is also decisive for the opening of the “Ode to the Nightingale”: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

 See, in this regard, Wolfram Schmitt’s (1990: 14– 17) phenomenological description of symptoms of melancholia.

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Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: (Keats 2000 f: ll. 1– 20)

Here, the speaker also stresses a state of “drowsy numbness” and associates it with images of death, such as the “hemlock”, the “dull opiate [emptied] to the drains”, the reference to the river Lethe or the intoxicating wine in the second stanza. The subsequent identification with the nightingale continues this notion of absence since, according to Morris Dickstein, the poet’s quest for self‐annihilation (read in the context of negative capability) is closely linked to a desire for death (Dickstein 1987: 34): “The poet’s desire to ‘fade far away, dissolve’ and ‘to leave the world unseen’ powerfully sums up and re-enacts the impulses towards self-annihilation and luxurious transcendence” (Dickstein 1987: 30). Whereas the “Ode to the Nightingale” at least stages an identification with an object (though very ambivalent as will be shown later), the “Ode on Indolence” explicitly repels such symbolic acts: the poet’s “idle days” (Keats 2000 g: l. 15) are interrupted by the appearance of three spectral figures, personifying love, ambition and poetry. Contrary to biographical readings, I suggest that those three allegorical figures primarily represent sublimation, Ersatzobjekte, which the poet rejects in favor of a melancholic denial of negation: O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness? […] Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright, Into the clouds, and never more return! (Keats 2000 g: ll. 19 – 20, 59 – 60)

From the first encounter in the second stanza until the ode’s end, the speaker averts these haunting figures of sublimation in favor of a state of affective absence (“leave my sense / Unhaunted quite of all”). He tellingly describes this as a void, a “nothingness”, which ultimately discloses his melancholic attachment to the unnameable Thing, i. e. a lost object that he does not want to defer to the symbolic via sublimation. The latter is moreover figuratively indicat-

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ed in the last line of the penultimate stanza: “Upon your [the three figures’; D.K.] skirts had fallen no tears of mine” (Keats 2000 g: l. 50). That is, the speaker does not project his sorrow (his tears) onto these three figures of sublimation as a work of mourning would require it. Instead, he preserves his loss in its asymbolical quality as manifested in the depressive affect of extreme affective reduction (“Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright”). Moreover, apart from not wanting to defer the lost object to the symbolic, the melancholic simply is not able to do so since the signifying sequence appears to be utterly arbitrary to him, that is to say that symbolic reference is lost: A signifying sequence, necessarily an arbitrary one, will appear to them as heavily, violently arbitrary; they will think it absurd, it will have no meaning. No word, no object in reality will be likely to have a coherent concatenation that will also be suitable to a meaning or a referent. The arbitrary sequence perceived by depressive persons as absurd is coextensive with a loss of reference. (Kristeva 1989: 51)

Consequently, the three allegorical figures of the ode – read as objects and signs of sublimation, i. e. as instances of the symbolic – are perceived as completely strange by the lyrical I: […] They came again; as when the urn once more Is shifted round, the first seen shades return; And they were strange to me, […] […] How is it, shadows! that I knew ye not? How came ye muffled in so hush a mask? (Keats 2000 g: ll. 7– 9, 11– 12)

Although he eventually recognises them as Love, Ambition and Poesy in the third stanza, they are still described throughout the poem as spectral entities (i. e. as “shades”, “shadows”, “ghosts” and “phantoms”; Keats 2000 g: ll. 8, 11, 51, 59), suggesting the absence of full signification and the speaker’s loss of reference. As such, the speaker’s repeated rejection of these figures (e. g. “So, ye three ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise / My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass”; Keats 2000 g: ll. 51– 52) is not only grounded in his feverish desire to preserve the lost object by denying its negation, but it also foregrounds the (perceived) senselessness of symbolic sublimation.

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This loss of reference can be traced in the other odes as well. In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, for example, Keats takes up the image of the urn in an ambivalent manner. On the one hand, it can be read as a material, sublimatory externalisation of the lost Thing; its sublime qualities mirroring the Thing’s unspeakable character. On the other hand, the urn – just as the Thing – eludes representation. Its ekphrastic depiction is therefore characterised by a fundamental indeterminacy as demonstrated by the speaker’s numerous questions to the urn, ultimately suggesting that the object cannot be fully apprehended within the symbolic.²⁰⁹ The urn’s mysterious, indeterminate character is further indicated by its ambivalent gendering as both female and male,²¹⁰ thus transcending binary oppositions and the realm of the symbolic. Against the backdrop of the “Ode on Indolence”, Keats’s famous paradox, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (Keats 2000d: ll. 11– 12) turns out to be even more revealing of his melancholic disposition: it is not the realm of the symbolic (i. e. the heard melodies, the signifier) but the asymbolic (i. e. the unheard, the irrepresentability of the Thing) that provides the melancholic with an ambivalent pleasure. In depicting the unrepresentable and in failing to do so, the melancholic denies symbolic negation and preserves (introjects) the depressive affect of the lost Thing, his subjectivity becoming an archive of the latter. In other words, whereas the “Ode on Indolence” explicitly denies symbolic negation, “The Ode on a Grecian Urn” constructs a sublimatory, external Ersatzobjekt only to deconstruct it and disclose the representational void of the Thing. A similar movement is also decisive for the “Ode to a Nightingale”, in whose final stanza the speaker acknowledges that “the fancy cannot cheat so well” (Keats 2000 f: l. 73), i. e. that his previous identification with the external object via the symbolic has failed. The speaker thus not only foregrounds his loss of symbolic reference – i. e. the collapse of the subject-object relation within signification²¹¹ – but also re-enacts and returns to the initially described mood of nothingness, his melancholic “living death” (Kristeva 1989: 4), at the ode’s beginning. Consequently, the poet stresses exactly within the act of the object’s sublimation – to be more precise, in the very failure of that act – that he has “been half in love with easeful Death, / […] Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain” (Keats 2000 f: ll. 52– 56); that is, by denying symbolic negation the melancholic experiences the Thing’s  See also Fry (1987: 88) and Aske (1987: 129 – 131).  See Scott (1994: 143 – 146) for the urn’s ambivalent gender.  See, in a related context, Bode (2008: 221– 222), who argues that this collapse of the subjectobject relation is an expression of a fundamental epistemological uncertainty in which the speaker has to acknowledge that the radical Other is inaccessible.

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representational void, which is ultimately grounded in death. This interrelation is also suggested by the image of the urn, which functions both as an unrepresentable object (the Thing) within the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and as a metaphor for the ode itself, i. e. the ode constituting a material repository for an object closely associated with death.²¹² The nightingale and the urn, thus, are variations of the speaker’s denial of negation in the “Ode on Indolence”, objects within the threshold of asymbolia and sublimation, altogether disclosing the precarious nature of the archival act and the equally precarious identity of the melancholic subject. The precariousness surrounding both the melancholic’s archival act and his resulting identity further surfaces in instances of temporal disorder. As Julia Kristeva contends, melancholics frequently experience a strong deceleration in time (Kristeva 1989: 60 – 61), being bound to “[a]n overinflated, hyperbolic past [that] fills all the dimensions of psychic continuity” (Kristeva 1989: 60). In his empirical analyses of endogenous depressed persons, Erwin Straus derives similar conclusions. Accordingly, the depressed are characterised by an incongruity between the objectively measurable dimension of time on the one hand, and the subjectively experienced dimension of time on the other hand. The latter is perceived as extremely decelerated or even, in its most extreme form, as stasis. As a result, the depressed believe themselves to be wholly determined by the past, a past that does not pass by (Straus 1960: 127 ff., 140; see also Schmitt 1990: 22– 25). This distorted temporality can be explained with the concept of the death drive, which fundamentally underlies the melancholic disposition. Creating a surplus of binding energy, the death drive most notably emerges in instances of compulsive repetition (Hock: 216 – 221, 302– 303) with which the melancholic tries to incorporate, archive, the lost object. At its root, compulsive repetition is stasis and complies with the death drive’s regressive tendency (Freud 2003: 76 – 79, 95 – 97), i. e. to “reduce inner stimulative tension” (Freud 2003: 95). The melancholic subject hence not only reveals a further aspect of its “unfulfilled mourning for the maternal object” (Kristeva 1989: 61), its denial of negation, but also tries to affectively return to the absolute origin – the maternal chora – through the act of feverishly archiving the lost object. In John Keats’s odes, the phenomenology of melancholic temporality, i. e. the subject’s experience of stasis, surfaces in instances of (a) silence and (b) circularity. The use of silence refers to the inexpressible (the “mysterious ‘dark spots’ which elude representation”; Fournier 2010: 88),²¹³ that is, as I shall contend, it refers to  See, in a different context, also Fry, who contends that death “is the urn’s primary condition” (1987: 86).  See Fournier (2010: 88) and Watson (1997: 72, 84) for the use of silence in Keats’s poetry and its relation to the inexpressible.

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the (melancholic’s attachment to) the Thing. Circularity, in turn, is closely related to the logic of compulsive repetition. Though agreeing with Helen Vendler’s observation (1987: 104– 109) that Shakespeare’s Hamlet serves as an important pretext for several of the odes with reference to the appearance of haunting figures (such as in “The Ode on Indolence”), I nevertheless suggest that the importance of this pretext primarily lies in Hamlet’s compulsive hesitation and delay: Hamlet’s programmatic “To be, or not to be” (Shakespeare 2006: 3.1, v. 56) – i. e. the repetitive, circular play of fort/da, of presence and absence – is fundamentally rooted in his melancholic disposition, ultimately unveiling the presence of the death drive; a melancholic circularity that is equally determinative for Keats’s odes and their feverish desire to possess the lost object by re-enacting and, consequently, delaying its loss. The interrelation between the notions of silence and melancholic stasis is paradigmatically elaborated in the opening stanza of “Ode to Psyche”: O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear: Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes? I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet, scarce espied: ‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: The winged boy I knew; But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? His Psyche true! (Keats 2000e: ll. 1– 23)

With his paradoxical apostrophe to Psyche, “O Goddess! Hear these tuneless numbers wrung”, the speaker alludes to his attempt at approaching the unspeakable Thing (embodied by the idealness and spectrality of the figure of Psyche)

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outside the realm of the signifier as conveyed through the notion of silence. That is, the “tuneless numbers” refer to a mode of signification beyond the symbolic; in short, to the melancholic’s denial of negation. This ties in with the ode’s final stanza, “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind” (Keats 2000e: ll. 50 – 51), in which the melancholic subject explicitly identifies itself as an archive of the lost Thing (i. e. building the fane for Psyche in his mind). We are not likely to forget the peculiar double structure of this final stanza as it metapoetically comments on the first part as well as actually preceding it, i. e. the shrine he sets out to build in the last stanza is, in fact, the preceding poem. Psyche’s/the Thing’s representational void, thus, is represented and incorporated through a denial of negation that manifests itself in instances of silence, suggesting the absence of signification. The speaker’s voice and choir for Psyche, his shrine/archive, therefore paradoxically stress (to a large extent) that there is no “temple / […] nor altar […] / Nor virgin-choir […] / No voice, no lute, no pipe […] / No shrine” (Keats 2000e: ll. 28 – 34) – in short, silence. Again, Keats’s shrine for the lost object comes into existence precisely in the absence of a (representational) shrine. Consequently, Psyche’s silent form is also associated with stasis as can be seen in the speaker’s initial depiction (lines 9 and 17) of her with Cupid: “[I] Saw to fair creatures, couched side by side […] / Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu”. This passage explicitly demonstrates the melancholic subject’s distorted sense of temporality, i. e. an extreme deceleration of the subjectively apprehended time as conveyed by the static, unfulfilled kiss between the two lovers. This Keatsian frozen moment of time together with the allusion to the poet’s “wrung” (Keats 2000e: l. 1) silent song reminds us, of course, of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Here, the notions of silence and stasis equally play an important role. Generally, critics agree that the urn’s silence indicates its representational void, a realm beyond language.²¹⁴ At this point, I would like to shift the perspective from the object’s ontology to the speaker’s epistemology. In particular, I want to consider not only the peculiar asymbolic status of the lost object (being, as previously argued, a spectral figuration of the Thing), but also the way the melancholic subject perceives (and, through this, introjects) the latter, namely in terms of silence and stasis, overall disclosing the melancholic temporality described. Similar to Psyche, the speaker identifies the urn at the poem’s very beginning with silence and stasis: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time” (Keats 2000d:

 See, for example, Fry (1987: 86 – 87); Bloom (2004: 16 – 17); Fournier (2010: 95); or Watson (1997: 83).

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ll. 1– 2). In the second and third stanza that follow, the speaker perceives the urn through metaphors of stasis, such as the unfulfilled, static kiss (“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / […] She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss”; Keats 2000d: ll. 17– 19) or images associated with eternal spring (e. g. “Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu” or “For ever warm”; Keats 2000d: ll. 21– 22, 26). The numerous, compulsive repetitions within both the stanzas’ microstructure (e. g. the geminatio in “never, never canst thou kiss”, “happy, happy boughs”, or the tautotes of “happy”) and those of its macrostructure – i. e. the variations of metaphoric images of stasis, in which the vehicle changes but the tenor remains the same – figuratively and structurally create a strong sense of stasis. In fact, even the rhetorical device of ekphrasis is strongly connected to the idea of stasis.²¹⁵ This stasis is further emphasised by the fact that the third stanza lacks a main verb, thus suggesting the absence of any motion.²¹⁶ The subsequent unanswered (i. e. a form of silence) questions to the urn in the fourth stanza – which, together with the poem’s beginning, frame the passages that have just been described – further link the urn’s stasis with the notion of silence: the urn’s melodies, its piping, are only that of silence – a silence that can only be “heard” and re-enacted by the spirit, namely through the melancholic’s narcissistic introjection of the asymbolic Thing beyond sublimatory signification. Consequently, the urn’s “silent form” ultimately turns out to be a “Cold pastoral” (Keats 2000d: 44, 45) – death. The notion of silence in the odes is complemented by numerous instances of circularity and repetition, which reveal the melancholic subject’s warped experience of time. In the foregoing discussion on the odes, various forms of repetition have been already broached. These comprised semantic and acoustic repetitions within the texts’ microstructure (e. g. the repetition of core metaphors or the use of alliteration, consonance etc.) and circular structures in the macrostructure, such as in “Ode to Psyche” or “Ode to a Nightingale”, whose beginning and ending coincide with each other. A further manifestation can be observed, for example, in the self-reflexivity of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode on Melancholy”, in which the reflections made on the urn and the phenomenon of melancholy simultaneously constitute their performative re‐enactment; in other words, meta-level and object-level conflate here. The seminal text for the lyrical I’s experience of stasis is, nevertheless, the “Ode on Indolence”. Echoing

 See Scott (1994: 147) for the relation of ekphrasis to the notion of stasis in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.  See Aske (1987: 126 – 127) for the absence of a main verb in the poem’s third stanza.

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the previously discussed mood of asymbolic nothingness, it is fundamentally marked by circular-repetitive structures and images. The speaker’s initial description of the three figures is revealing in this regard: “One morn before me were three figures seen, / […] They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn, / When shifted round to see the other side” (Keats 2000 g: ll. 1– 6). The simile not only intertextually relates the poem to the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and its static urn, but it also self-reflexively mirrors its own structure, i. e. the repetitive, circular appearance and disappearance of the figures in the subsequent five stanzas. In line with the very title of the ode, the death drive’s manifestation in these repetitive structures – a play of fort/da, of presence and absence, of to be and not to be – discloses the regressive nature of the melancholic subject, its desire to reduce stimulative tension, and, as a result, to introject the lost maternal object. If the “Ode on Indolence” is the seminal text for the speaker’s melancholic disposition in the other odes, then “To Autumn” constitutes their culmination and endpoint (Bloom 2004: 23; Vendler 1987: 196). Here, the notion of melancholic temporality as manifested in deceleration/stasis and the death drive’s repetition compulsion is extremely present. As has been shown before, the central trope of the ode’s strophe is that of gathering and enumeration. Besides figuring the themes of ripeness and fullness, the strophe’s repetitive structure – i. e. it merely builds on a repetition/variation of the core metaphor – actually suggests the absence of any movement. This sense of stasis is continued in the antistrophe with the personification of autumn: […] Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook […] And sometimes like a gleaner dost thou keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. (Keats 2000c: ll. 13 – 22)

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Autumn – here gendered as female,²¹⁷ thus further suggesting a connection to the “[v]eil’d Melancholy” (Keats 2000a: l. 26) of “Ode on Melancholy” – is depicted in a passive, if not indolent, mood that is loosely reminiscent of the famous female figure in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I; in particular, the figure “sitting careless” with its “laden head” who watches “the last oozings hours by hours”, which can be related to the engraving’s hourglass. Not least, the ode’s dominant image of harvesting establishes a further link to Saturn/Kronos and to Dürer’s Melencolia I: whereas the mythological character is associated with the element of earth and agriculture, the planet Saturn is traditionally related to melancholia. In Dürer’s engraving, the number “I” in the title and the star in the background have been similarly related to Saturn (Unverfehrt 1997: 206; Klibansky et al. 1990; Radden 2000: 88). Finally, the allusion to sleeping and being “drows’d with the fume of poppies” aligns the personified autumn with a mood of lethargic nothingness that verges on death, which we similarly encountered in the “Ode to the Nightingale”. In short, the antistrophe is both a variation on the strophe and its continuation at the same time, resulting in a complex metaphor denoting melancholic stasis. The increasingly pressing expectation of oncoming change, which has been built up in the first two stanzas via images of autumnal ripeness and numerous instances of stasis, is, however, ultimately denied in the epode: whereas Shelley praises in his “Ode to the West Wind” cyclical change and renewal (“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”; Shelley 2000b: l. 70), for the melancholic Keats there is no progress (“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”; Keats 2000c: ll. 23 – 24).²¹⁸ In other words, Keats fulfils his desired state of indolence in the “Ode on Indolence” by denying sublimation and, instead, introjecting the loss, i. e. he prolongs and preserves his mood of melancholy as also indicated in his “Ode on Melancholy”, “Emprison her [Melancholy’s; D.K.] soft hand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes” (Keats 2000a: ll. 19 – 20). Against this backdrop, I want to re‐evaluate Harold Bloom’s conclusion that the poem “has climaxed in an acceptance of process beyond the possibility of grief” (2004: 23): I suggest that beyond grief, i. e. sublimation and the symbolic, lies the asymbolic abyss of melancholia as manifested in instances where there is denial of negation. Accordingly, the poem ends with an anticipation of death (e. g. via the images of the dying day)  For a comprehensive discussion of this issue see Vendler (1983: 190 – 195).  See also Bloom (2004: 23): “We feel that we might be at the end of tragedy or epic, having read only a short ode. […] there is no further need for progression.” or Hartman (1987: 49): “We remain within a magical circle where things repeat each other in a finer tone, as Autumn turns into a second spring”.

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where the numerous cyclical/repetitive structures and images shall culminate in absolute stasis. This is accompanied by the absence of the speaker²¹⁹ for, in melancholia, object-loss is both introjected and also turned into ego-loss: in “To Autumn” – the “most negative capable of all of Keats’s great poems” according to Geoffrey Hartman (1987: 52) – the subject has not only become an archive of the lost object, it has also become the very loss. By this means, i. e. through an extreme denial of negation that is closely connected to the Keatsian idea of negative capability,²²⁰ the gesture of (the) loss (of the maternal object²²¹) is re‐enacted: by “destroying themselves, they [melancholic’s; D.K.] exhaust any possibility of an object, and this is also a roundabout way of preserving it . . . elsewhere, untouchable” (Kristeva 1989: 48). *** Tellingly, however, “To Autumn” does not conclude with death as its ultimate consequence but rather remains in – or to be more precise, prolongs – an intermediate stage between life and death (as allegorically figured by the melancholic season of autumn, a “temperate zone” as Hartman [1987: 47] describes it) that fundamentally determines the spectral nature of the melancholic subject as archive and its object: melancholia, and especially its re-enactment in art, is a “living death” (Kristeva 1989: 4) in which destructive asymbolia and partially sublimating constructions intermingle, overall re‐enacting an ambivalent fort/da game with the lost object. This is, on the one hand, achieved by asymbolic constructions, such as the previously analysed loss of reference and instances of stasis: precisely because the desired (lost) object is destroyed, it is not deferred to the symbolic and thus preserved – in short, this represents a denial of negation. On the other hand, these disrupted signifiers can also assume the form of “hypersigns”, providing a further affective hold over the object via a semiotisation of the symbolic. That is, via a splitting of the signifier, the semiotic imprints (i. e. “drive-related representatives and affect representations”; Kristeva 1989: 52) can be laid bare and be treated as “quasi-objects” (Kristeva 1989: 52) of the Thing. These hyper-signs – which are manifestations of the melancholic’s narcissistic

 See Bate (1979: 581): “The poet himself is completely absent; there is no ‘I’, no suggestion of the discursive language that we find in the other odes”.  For the relation between Keats’s notion of “negative capability” and Kristeva’s concept of “denial of negation” in theoretical terms, see chapter II.3.2 “The Melancholic Subject”.  See also Vendler, who argues that the poem “retells the story of the death of the mother [in mythological terms]” (1983: 193).

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omnipotence²²² as opposed (yet closely related) to the previously discussed instances of retardation and destructive stasis – engender a notable creativity, which has been traditionally associated with the melancholic artist. Taking this into consideration, we might ask whether the Romantic sensibility and notion of the artist as genius are not grounded on a fundamental melancholic disposition? As such, art (and poetry in particular) is the medium where affective and linguistic imprints overlap, where the semiotic may take hold over the symbolic, where the struggle between destructive melancholia and a somewhat sublimatory fetishising of the lost object is carried out:²²³ “the depressive affect – and its verbalization in analyses and also in works of art – is the perverse display of depressed persons, their ambiguous source of pleasure that fills a void and evicts death, protecting the subject from suicide as well as from psychotic attack” (Kristeva 1989: 48). As a kind of semi-object, the depressive affect hence provides a “narcissistic homoestasis by means of a nonverbal, unnameable […] hold over a nonobjectal Thing” (Kristeva 1989: 48) So, Martin Aske’s rather vague theoretical question whether “Keats’s floral language […] is a necessity rather than a luxury, the symptom of a desire to prolong contact with a world (a landscape of fictions) which has virtually disappeared but which seems to be indispensable to the flowering of Poesy” (1987: 126) should be decisively affirmed in light of the aforementioned theoretical premises: such a denial of negation is both symptom and a necessity, given melancholia’s (self‐)destructiveness; the melancholic’s “speech is a mask – a beautiful façade carved out of a ‘foreign language’” (Kristeva 1989: 55), manifesting itself in Keats’s highly creative aesthetics. How, then, does the depressive affect come into picture, especially in Keats’s poetry? To answer this question, I want to focus on two forms indicated by Kristeva, namely the suprasegmental level of language and hyperlucidity. Regarding the former, Kristeva argues that, within depressive speech, the suprasegmental level (such as rhythm or intonation) acquires a special meaning in that it signifies beyond the symbolic – which has become empty and meaningless in the course of the denial of negation – thereby exposing the affective primary imprints (Kristeva 1989: 53, 55 – 58). Keats’s “increasing preoccupation with sound and ultimately silence over vision” (Fournier 2010: 96) has been noted by many commentators of his oeuvre. In the following three representative ex-

 “denial of negation is the logical expression of omnipotence. Through their empty speech they assure themselves of an inaccessible (because it is ‘semiotic’ and not ‘symbolic’) ascendancy over an archaic object that thus remains, for themselves and all others, an enigma and a secret.” (Kristeva 1989: 64).  See Kristeva (1989: 47– 48, 52– 53, 64– 66) for the discussed notions of the melancholic/depressive affect and the semiotic hold over the Thing.

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amples, I want to show how this musicality is significantly indebted to the melancholic’s inability to detach from the lost object, that is, the manner in which it discloses its attempt at affectively retaining the Thing. In the previous analyses, it has been argued that the urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” eludes representation and is identified with silence, suggesting the unrepresentability of the Thing. A closer look at the poem, however, reveals how the object’s silence is approached with a high degree of musicality. This is exemplified from the very beginning of the poem, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme” (Keats 2000d: ll. 1– 4), and in the final stanza, “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity: Cold Pasatoral!” (Keats 2000d: ll. 44– 45). The musicality of these lines is, among other things, produced through Keats’s abundant use of fricatives (frequently coinciding with the stressed syllables of the dominant iambic metre; also note the metrical inversion in the third line), with which he also acoustically links the notions of “silence”, “quietness” and “slow time”. What cannot be expressed by the symbolic is here adumbrated through the affective level of rhythm, sound and intonation. The urn’s “flowery tale” (i. e. the Thing’s elusiveness), thus, has to be grasped beyond the symbolic (“our rhyme”) via the affective within the suprasegmental level. In other words, the urn’s unheard melodies beyond the signifier imply the unspeakable realm (here pictured as “eternity”) of the Thing. This is contrasted by the numerous questions posed by the speaker as he strives to locate the object within the symbolic. A similar rhetorical strategy is decisive for his “Ode to Psyche”: O latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap’d with flowers; Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. (Keats 2000e: ll. 24– 35)

Here, Psyche’s elusiveness – which is figured on the level of the signifier via an excessive enumeration of negatives (“temple thou hast none”; “Nor altar”, “Nor

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virgin-choir” etc.) and comparatives (“Fairer than Phoebe’s […] star, / or Vesper”), altogether suggesting the absence of symbolic reference – is similarly approximated by the presence of a highly crafted musicality. The abundant use of anaphoras, alliterations, assonance (especially o-sounds) together with several run-on lines divulge the speaker’s affective hold over the object in spite of its representational absence. The same applies to the fifth stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale”, where the speaker tries to identify with (or, incorporate) the subliminal, elusive nightingale. Despite its representational absence, a strong musicality (manifesting itself, for example, in the consonance of fricatives, especially s- and f-sounds) dominates this section, giving additional meaning to its introductory line, “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet” (Keats 2000 f: l. 41): the unrepresentable Thing and its embeddedness in/exteriorisation as sublime nature (here: the “flowers”) cannot be seen via the symbolic (the “feet” ambiguously referring here to the written poetic verses, the symbolic) but have to be felt on the affective level, imparted through the semiotisation of the suprasegmental. In light of this, Keats’s meta‐commentary in the final stanza of the “Ode to Psyche”, “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / […] shall murmur in the wind” (Keats 2000e: ll. 50 – 53), acquires its full meaning: the melancholic’s ambivalent enjoyment (his “pleasant pain”) of the lost object (Psyche) manifests itself not in the chain of signifiers (sublimation) but in a semiotisation of language’s suprasegmental level (the thoughts that tellingly “murmur in the wind”). In so doing, the subject displays its excessive, affective attachment to the lost object and introjects it, ultimately becoming an archive (as explicitly conveyed through the metaphoric line, “[I will] build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind”). Not least, even the rhyme schemes of these examples acquire additional meaning as their respective patterns (the pattern of abab followed by minor variations of the cdecde sestet in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, ababcdecde in the fifth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale” and ababcdcdefef in the second stanza of “Ode to Psyche”) evoke characteristic elements of the sonnet structure: whereas the cross-rhyming quatrains are reminiscent of the Shakespearean sonnet, the two tercets gesture towards the Petrarchan sestet. Through these allusions, the generic tradition of the sonnet is (fragmentarily) grafted onto the object (thus functioning as an additional archive, a representational frame), further establishing the poet’s paradoxical task of representing the unrepresentable (also note in this context the previously cited apostrophe to Psyche, featuring negatives and superlatives which clearly follow the conventions of Petrarchan love poetry). Put shortly, all these examples illustrate how the melancholic subject approaches the Thing’s unrepresentability not through the symbolic but through

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a semiotisation of the suprasegmental level, disclosing its affective imprints and, thus, itself becoming a “quasi-object” (Kristeva 1989: 52) which the melancholic can introject. A further manifestation of the depressive affect can be seen in instances of hyperlucidity. These become apparent in “accelerated, creative cognitive process[es]” (Kristeva 1989: 59), such as unusual associations or in the merging of apparently disconnected semantic fields (Kristeva 1989: 59), altogether “setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier” (Kristeva 1989: 44). By (de)constructing such split signifiers, the melancholic seeks “an escape route away from confrontation with stable signification or a steady object” (Kristeva 1989: 59). Though, at first glance, in contrast with the previously analysed examples of asymbolia, these hypertrophic forms are a mere “erotic simulacrum, […] lovely impressions” (Derrida 1995: 14), disguising the workings of the death drive and the closely related excessive attachment to the lost object.²²⁴ Given the well‐known (stylistic‐aesthetic) abundance of Keats’s language, the following brief examples should suffice in order to paradigmatically illustrate my points. Although the examples of gathering (e.g. in the excessive repetition of the core metaphor in “To Autumn” or in the “Ode on Melancholy”) that were initially discussed denote stasis through repetition, they also testify, at the same time, to a remarkably associative form of creativity by repeatedly expressing the same idea via disparate images/semantic fields. In the strophe of the “Ode on Melancholy”, for example, the notion of death is expressed over ten lines through images taken from the semantic fields of Greek mythology (such as the river Lethe and the shades in the underworld, and the figure of Proserpine/Persephone), flowers (poisonous wolfsbane), colours (the “pale forehead” foreshadowing death) or insects (the beetle with its relation to decomposition and the death-moth with a skull-like pattern on its thorax). Tellingly, these are all metonymical references suggesting, in contrast to metaphors, not analogy/identity but rather deferred relations; that is, they avoid stable signification by repeatedly displacing the signifier. A similar strategy employed through an exceedingly associative displacement can be seen in the second stanza of “Ode to Psyche”. Here the speaker approaches Psyche’s elusiveness ex-negativo by combining images from mythology, astronomy, minerals and insects within one (!) simile (“Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star, / Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm

 See Hock (2000: 211– 212, 216 – 218); Däuker (2002: 167– 168); Derrida (1995: 14); and my discussion of the interrelation between the death drive, archive fever, melancholia and the sublime in chapter II.2 “Loss, Melancholia, the Archive and Spectrality”.

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of the sky”; Keats 2000e: ll. 26 – 27), making known his hyperlucid cognition, which, at the same time, substantiates the dissemination of signification. Finally, Keats’s frequent use of synaesthesia²²⁵ constitutes a further manifestation of not only hyperlucidity²²⁶, but especially of the ingenious disruption that occur in the relation between signifier and signified. In particular, due to the synesthetic merging of various sensory impressions, symbolic reference is lost and the chain of signifiers is semiotised instead. Within this framework, it is telling that synaesthesia dominates the aforementioned section of the “Ode to a Nightingale”, where the speaker delights in his lethargic mood of nothingness: O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: (Keats 2000 f: ll. 11– 20)

In these lines, Keats merges sensory impressions ranging from taste, smell, sound, through to the visual (colors). His desire for a “draught of vintage” that amalgamates all these sensory impressions is, thus, also the melancholic’s bitter‐sweet desire for/relishing in the experience of asymbolia as manifested in those densely semiotised, compulsive²²⁷ hyper‐signs. The same is also true for his depiction of the indolent mood in the “Ode on Indolence”: characteristically, it is also described via synesthetic lines that combine taste, the visual, temporal and affective (such as in “Ripe was the drowsy hour”; “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence”; or “so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steep’d in honied indolence”; Keats 2000 g: ll. 15, 16, 36 – 37). Besides giving voice to his (desired) melancholic mood through synesthetic hyper-signs, Keats also uses

 For Keats’s frequent use of synesthesia, see, exemplarily, Ullmann (1945).  See Carter and McRae (2001: 210): “[Keats’s language] registers a full range of sense impressions” or Bate (1975: 416): “the really distinctive quality in Keats[’s use of synesthesia; D.K] […] is less the substitution than it is the substantiation of one sense by another”.  Cf. Ullmann (1945: 827): “Keats had almost to fight against a constraint, an inner urge impelling him to reflect in his poetry the interplay of sensations which was constantly taking place in his own mind.”

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this aesthetic strategy (or, to be more precise, this depressive affect) for approaching the aforementioned elusive objects that hint at the Thing: whereas the polyvalent word “still” in “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness” (Keats 2000d: l. 1) in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” denotes both motion/vision and sound, the nightingale in “Ode to a Nightingale” is adumbrated in a hyperlucid merging of sensory impressions, such as in “embalmed darkness, guess each sweet” or “Darkling I listen” (Keats 2000 f: ll. 43, 51). Complementary to the semiotisation of the suprasegmental level of language that was previously analysed, Keats also semiotises the symbolic by staging an associative splitting of the signifier – a notably creative disruption of signifier and signified, which is both opposed to the aforementioned asymbolia while also constituting a manifestation of it at the same time. *** It has been shown that the phenomenon of melancholia in John Keats’s odes is closely related to the notion of archive fever. On the one hand, Keats conceives melancholia through numerous discursive and material references to archives and archiving processes. These comprise, for example, spaces (such as buildings acting as physical repositories), archived objects, or various discourses and acts of collecting/gathering that reveal the speaker’s feverish desire to archive. On the other hand, his odes are reifications of a fundamental melancholic disposition in which the subject itself becomes an archive of its lost object, the Thing. The many references to physical repositories, with which Keats identifies melancholia, therefore, simultaneously constitute (spatial) metaphors for the speaker’s psyche, i. e. his archival act or introjection of the lost object. This introjection, i. e. the melancholic’s inability to detach from the lost object and his excessive attachment to it, manifests itself in various instances where a denial of negation occurs, through which the loss is not sublimated within the symbolic but, instead, evoked within the semiotic. This process emerges in moments of asymbolia (e. g. losses of reference, stasis or silence) and the excessiveness of hyper‐signs (i. e. in semiotisations of the symbolic and its suprasegmental layer), both of them constituting the depressive affect. In so doing, the lost object is both reconstructed and deconstructed, the text and the subject as archive oscillating between the object’s presence and absence, compulsively repeating the gesture of loss and, through this, also narcissistically incorporating it (Kristeva 1989: 46, 51– 52). This structure of repetition, in the course of which the loss is continuously re-enacted, turns out to be determinative for the odes’ microstructure (as has been shown by the various examples where there is a denial of negation) as well as for their macrostructure. The latter can be seen, for example, in the deconstructive movement throughout “Ode to a

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Nightingale”, in which the object is first re- and then deconstructed, the melancholic speaker thereby “luxuriat[ing] in his own inner tensions” (Dickstein 1987: 38 – 39). These tensions arise precisely from the archiving subject’s precarious identity that is, in turn, closely entangled with the object’s spectrality. The same aspects also determine the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which the very failure of representation is what constitutes the poem as such,²²⁸ i. e. a re‐enactment of the experience of loss that – paradoxically – indicates the subject’s inability to detach from the lost object. Within this context, the speaker’s intention in the last lines of the “Ode to Psyche”, to not only become an archive of the lost object (Psyche) but to also provide “A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in!” (Keats 2000e: ll. 66 – 67) is fundamentally indebted to his melancholic and ambivalent enjoyment of the experience of loss: in line with the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Keats also commits the sin of looking, which is inextricably bound to the loss of the desired object and which is, as has been shown before, performatively re‐enacted in the poem’s first part (which this final stanza actually precedes). With that said, we can conclude that this melancholic re-enactment of loss determines not only the individual odes’ macrostructure, but also the macrostructure of the six odes seen as a thematic unity. In other words, all six odes fetishise the lost object (the Thing) by archiving it in various permutations (e. g. as the Grecian urn, Psyche or the nightingale) and compulsively repeating the experience/affect of loss by destroying the archived object. If there is any continuity and progress in these odes at all, then it has to be located in “To Autumn”, which culminates precisely in a conflation of ego loss²²⁹, stasis and death, i. e. in a highly precarious conflation of the archiving subject with its lost object (the notion of the Thing). In this manner, “To Autumn” epitomises the melancholic’s desire for prolongation of his precarious state (to “Emprison her [melancholia’s; D.K.] soft hand”; Keats 2000a: l. 19), namely a prolongation of the archived object’s spectrality, its simultaneous presence and absence, its being and not being. “She [Melancholia] dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die” writes Keats (2000a: l. 21) in the epode of “Ode on Melancholy” and further explicates it insofar as

 “The poem refutes its poetic success step by step and yet constructs itself through these very steps of self-destruction, builds itself up by ruining itself. Its achievement is its downfall, its downfall its success.” (Hofmann 2006: 284).  Keats “minimize[s] the role of [the] speaker in successive odes until, from the visible single poet in ‘Indolence’, ‘Psyche,’ and ‘Nightingale,’ he has become the self-effacing and anonymous speaker, not specified as a poet, of ‘Autumn’”. (Vendler 1987: 106).

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[…] in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; (Keats 2000a: ll. 25 – 28)

And this image precisely constitutes the key to his odes in their entirety: they demonstrate feverish attempts at introjection (note the metaphor of eating here), archiving the lost object by and through destroying it. The compulsive repetition prolongs this state, thereby exposing the melancholic’s “aching Pleasure” (Keats 2000a: l. 23) through the repeated (and creatively staged) gesture of loss. And to the same extent that the lost object surfaces as a spectral entity in the course of these ambivalent archiving processes (i. e. as a destructive genesis of creativity), the archiving subject’s identity also turns out to be precarious, self‐destructive, melancholic and nobilitating at the same time. Keats’s capacity to endure the ambivalences and paradoxes of melancholia and archive fever not only demonstrates the maturity of his poetry but also engenders an unprecedented creativity.

V The Poem as Archive: Aesthetics, Genre and Writing 1 Re-Writing the Male Archive The relationship between Romantic women authors and the notion of the archive is somewhat ambivalent. Regarding the canon of Romantic writers, i. e. their public archive as materially manifested in the printed publication of poetry collections, women writers were largely marginalised from the mid-nineteenth century on (Kelley 2004: 281; Kelley and Feldman 1995: 2– 3; Franklin 2015: 118). Around the 1980s and 1990s Romantic women writers were re-canonised with the publication of, for example, Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989), Jerome McGann’s The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993) or Duncan Wu’s Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (1997). This re‐canonisation paved the way for increasing reappraisals throughout the 21st century, both in terms of (critical) canon formation and literary criticism as can be seen, for instance, in the publication of Devoney Looser’s (ed.) volume, The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period (2015), Lucy Newlyn’s long chapter “Feminizing the Poetics of Reception” in Reading, Writing, and Romanticism (2000) and Michael O’Neill’s and Charles Mahoney’s Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2008). The exclusion of women from the Romantic literary canon for such a long time is remarkable given the fact that they were very productive writers (between 1770 and 1835 around 500 women published poetry, among them established poets such as Anna Seward, Anna Laetita Barbauld, Mary Robinson or Charlotte Smith; Looser 2015: xiii) and had a strong influence on contemporary audiences and authors. To take some examples: Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), in which she presages Britain’s loss of imperial power and its collapse, was heavily criticised upon publication, showing that women authors were widely received and indeed taken seriously (Mellor 2015: 56; Coleman 2015: 137– 138). Charlotte Smith not only spearheaded the epoch’s revivification of the sonnet genre with her Elegiac Sonnets (1784), but she also exerted a strong influence on her (male and female) contemporaries (Behrendt 2015: 4– 5); Wordsworth, for example, praised her in a note accompanying his poem “Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Heads” (1833) as “a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered. She wrote little, and that a little unambitiously, but with true feeling for nature” (Wordsworth 2004: ll. 34– 38). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-006

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In contrast to the exclusion of women from archives (the literary canon), the flourishing culture of print – i. e. a further manifestation of the archive – gave women the opportunity to engage both passively and actively in a multitude of literary and non-literary discourses (such as science, historiography, philosophy, politics etc.), which had been mostly reserved for men (Mellor 2015). Not only had they access to those archives (understood as collections of documents) but they could also appropriate archival practices to account and modify the existing archive through the publication of their ideas, therefore creating the possibility to participate in critical debates. Whereas Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, for example, used various genres of fiction (most prominently, the Gothic novel and the historical novel) to communicate her political ideas and address questions of gender, Charlotte Smith used her reflections on Beachy Head in the eponymous poem as an occasion to criticise the slave trade. Combining affective discourse (usually attributed as “feminine”) with analytical thought, women authors were critically engaging with male philosophical traditions (Armstrong 1995: 15 – 16) or, more generally speaking, with predominantly male forms/discourses of knowledge and power. Following Isobel Armstrong, however, it would be wrong to simply incorporate Romantic women writers into the discourses/archives of a predominantly male constructed/perceived literary movement and aesthetics of “Romanticism” despite the fact of their presence in the literary scene of the time: Effectively, these poets are new poets. This is not to abdicate from history but to recognize that history changes history: the category of gender changes our sense of what we know, what we need to know, and how we know it. It is often hard to place women poets in a network of histories and relationships. Their interests do not follow the same intertextual relations as those of the male poets, nor does the trajectory of their intellectual debates parallel that of male writers. […] This complex set of alignments within British radical and “feminist” thought suggests the necessity of reading at other than the level of content, of what a poem overtly says, if the subtle negotiations with male texts by women poets are to be followed. A formal, structural, and linguistic project is bound up with intellectual debate in women’s poetry and asks to be addressed. (Armstrong 1995: 15 – 16)

Using the example of Anna Barbauld’s “Inscription for an Ice-House” and Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head”, I shall show in the following sections how the cultural presence of the archive and its archival practices are received from a feminine perspective. It will be argued that dominant forms of knowledge (involving historiography, science or aesthetics) are associated with predominantly male archival discourses, which are critically/self-reflexively adopted by the female authors in order to re-write those male archives.

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1.1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Inscription for an Ice-House” Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem “Inscription for an Ice-House” represents a paradigmatic example of the revisionary tendencies of Romantic women writers. Published in 1825 (supposedly composed around the 1790s) (O’Neill 2008: 157; Newlyn 157), the poem depicts the forerunner of what would be our modernday refrigerator: in the late 18th century, buildings that extended to the underground became fashionable among the rich because they could be filled with ice to store food throughout the year or to make ice-cream. Barbauld wrote this poem as an inscription to the outdoor cooler of William Smith, MP, of Pardon in Essex (McCarthy and Kraft 2002: 140). Not only is the trend for using icehouses – in other words, repositories that strive to preserve/archive their objects in their originality beyond the destructive effects of time – another example of the period’s technological and cultural preoccupation with archiving technologies, but Barbauld also conceives feminist concerns through the notion of the archive: at first sight being a “poem written to a refrigerator” (Armstrong 1995: 14), she engages with many of the aesthetic and cultural topics discussed in the previous chapters, resorting to various images of the archive, and thus exposing its discursive traces. On an abstract level, her “inscription” on the ice-house functions along the lines of the Derridean concept of exergue in that it exerts her authority over the (predominantly male) archives (as figured by the poem’s icehouse), re‐writing and modifying them. As I will show, this comprises the relation between men, knowledge and science (including archives and archiving techniques), and the male Romantic literary canon together with its aesthetics. Finally, the poem and its aesthetics are themselves deeply indebted to the rhetoric of the archive (fever), the poem being an “ice-house”, which she self-consciously explores on a meta‐level – a self-consciousness that is typical of women’s poetry at the time (Armstrong 1995: 32) and which also has a determinative impact on Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head”. Barbauld’s poem can be divided into four thematic sections, describing a movement from nature to culture/cultural artifacts and then back to nature, repeatedly inverting the power relations between man and nature. This movement, moreover, is paralleled by a gradual development from motion to stasis and eventually back to motion/fleetingness. In the first section (ll. 1– 7), the speaker invites a stranger to approach the ice house, which is depicted in terms of magic and miracle exercised by man in order to control nature’s chaos (“confined / By man, the great magician, who controls / Fire, earth and air, and genii of the storm”; Barbauld 2008: ll. 3 – 5). The second section (ll. 8 – 19) moves to the ice-house’s interior, describing it via a personification of a confined winter (“A giant sits; stern Winter”; Barbauld 2008: l. 7); the stranger should not be afraid

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of him for “He [winter; D.K.] will not cramp thy limbs with sudden age, / Nor whither with his touch the coyest flower” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 11– 12). Images of stasis dominate here, such as personified winter sitting on the floor or the speaker’s pledge that the normal course of time is suspended within this repository (e. g. flowers will not decay in contrast to the “southern gales” outside of the ice-house, which “Dissolve the fainting world”; Barbauld 2008: l. 9). These static images are continued in the poem’s third part (ll. 19 – 28) in which winter becomes “fair Pleasure’s minister” and is used (by man) to create various cultural artifacts in the form of a rich table of fruits, a “genial board” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 19, 20). These seem to be frozen in time, as the congealed melting peach and nectarine, or the frosted “crimson veins / Of the moist berry” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 24– 25) suggest. The final section (ll. 29 – 31) eventually returns its focus to temporality and fleetingness with winter “count[ing] the weeks / Of lingering Summer, mindful of his hour / To rush in whirlwinds forth, and rule the year” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 29 – 31), thus inverting the power relation between man and nature anew. The repeated inversion of the power relation between man and nature, in combination with the production of cultural artifacts and, not least, their conservation within the ice-house, echo the wider cultural (archival) context of the period. As has been shown before, Britain in the 18th and early 19th century is characterised not only by a rapidly growing production and accumulation of knowledge but also by the construction of its various archives together with archival acts such as identification and classification. Especially in the fields of technology and the natural sciences, it is man who exerts power over nature, domesticating it through various archiving techniques and technologies. Against this backdrop, the poem’s ice house “is used to symbolize the masculine terrain of science” (Newlyn 2000: 157) in a society in which women, on the one hand, studied and taught science (Bellanca 2003: 50, 53) but, on the other hand, “were not encouraged to become experimental or theoretical scientists, the producers and ‘shapers’ of new knowledge” (Bellanca 2003: 53). Barbauld, who was a keen reader of scientific books and also taught natural sciences at school (Bellanca 2003: 49 – 50), uses the notion of the archive as figured by the ice-house to critically (yet ambivalently) comment on the exclusion of women in science. The first part of the poem not only associates the wonders of technology and science with men (or male dominance) (Newlyn 2000: 157; Armstrong 1995: 14), but also does this by resorting to images and discourses of the archive (fever): it is man who magically controls the natural elements of fire, wind and earth, and “bends the most remote and opposite things / To do him service and perform his will” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 6 – 7). Besides implying an archival fever for a certain totality (as expressed by the natural elements,

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suggesting original forms and wholeness), this process can be subsumed under the Derridean concept of “consignation” (Derrida 1995: 10, 22), according to which disparate elements are put into a synchrony during the archival act. The substrate or “place of consignation, of ‘inscription’ or of ‘recording’” (Derrida 1995: 22 – 23) that is described in the poem – i. e. the ice-house – features further discursive traces: the elements, “treasured snows”, are “confined” beneath an “iron door […] [t]hat vaults with ponderous stone the cell” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 10, 3, 1– 3), altogether exposing the archiving subject’s strong desire to possess the object and exert his archival authority over it. In short, from the very beginning of the poem, science is associated with the archival act and is decidedly gendered as male. Man acts as archon ²³⁰, imposing the law/nomological principle over the archived object: “Arkhe, we recall, names at once commencement and the commandement. […] the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle” (Derrida 1995: 9). Whereas technology and winter are both gendered as male, the preserved fruit is clearly identified with the feminine:²³¹ [winter] Exerts his art to deck the genial board; Congeals the melting peach, the nectarine smooth, […] Darts sudden frost into the crimson veins Of the moist berry; moulds the sugared haul: Cools with his icy breath our flowing cups; Or gives to the fresh dairy’s nectared bowls A quicker zest. (Barbauld 2008: ll. 19 – 27)

The initial archival act is continued here by way of man using the confined/archived winter to preserve the fruit; also note in this context the speaker’s taking pleasure (as figured by the use of sensuous language in this section) in enumerating the various objects, alluding to its feverish desire to archive. Again, this act of archiving is associated with an exertion of male power and authority over the archived (this time female) objects as can be most notably seen with the metaphor of winter penetrating a berry (“[winter] darts sudden frost into the crimson  See Derrida (1995: 9) for the concept of the archon.  See Armstrong (1995: 21) and Newlyn (2000: 158) for the association of the fruits with female fertility. See also Bellanca’s general observation in the poem “The Invitation”, according to which “Barbauld’s portrayal of feminine ‘Nature’ suggests her immersion in a cultural language that subjects the feminine to a knowledge system used largely by men” (2003: 53).

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veins / of the moist berry”; Barbauld 2008: ll. 23 – 24). Yet, the archival act suggests a paradoxical simultaneity of preservation and destructiveness since “fruit is inseminated with ice” (Armstrong 1995: 21) and, as a result, is deprived of its (female) fertility and associated with stasis (Armstrong 1995: 21). This can be ultimately related to the wider cultural context of the time in which the female gendering of nature “both describes and fosters an agenda of mastery in Enlightenment science” (Bellanca 2003: 53), i. e. empowering men “to control both women and the material environment” (Bellanca 2003: 53). Barbauld’s critical engagement with male science via notions of the archive is, on a further abstract level, also a renegotiation of Romantic aesthetics and their predominantly male gendering.²³² Barbauld not only addressed political questions (e. g. women rights, slavery and minorities) but was also an influential literary critic of the epoch (Mellor 2015: 44, 55). Educated in early and mid-18th century aesthetics, she prepared critical editions of eighteenth century authors (including various prefaces), edited Samuel Richardson’s correspondence and published the fifty-volumes anthology The British Novelists (1810) (McCarthy 1996: 184; Fraklin 2015: 118) – a collection that is a further indication of the epoch’s desire to archive and attests to Barbauld’s active participation in the formation of literary canons and the construction of archives. It is thus not surprising that her “Inscription for an Ice-House” is also a critical engagement with the dominant (male) aesthetics of the Romantic period – a literary culture that she was suspicious of (McCarthy 1996: 184) – through the discourse and imagery of the archive. In particular, Barbauld’s depiction of the ice-house is a metaphor for prevalent Romantic aesthetics, in which the poem itself becomes a hubristic male archive of its objects. Another look at the first section reveals several parallels to the canonic early Romantics: the apostrophe to the stranger (“Stranger, approach!”; Barbauld 2008: l.1) might remind the reader of the beginning of William Wordsworth’s “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree” (“Nay, Traveller! Rest”; Wordsworth 1992 g: l. 1),²³³ in which he outlines his concept of imagination and implicitly criticises Burke’s theory of the sublime,²³⁴ thus setting the discursive stage for Barbauld’s own revision of these categories and her re-inscription into the ar-

 See Newlyn (2000: 157) for the relation between male science and male Romantic aesthetics.  For this intertextual reference, see O’Neill (2008: 5) or Newlyn (2000: 158).  See, for example, Viscomi, or Geoffrey Hartman’s reading of the poem as “inscription” (1970: 206 – 230), whose generic classification further supports the parallels mentioned with Barbauld’s “inscription”.

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chive. The aforementioned “great magician” controlling “Fire, earth and air, and genii of the storm” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 4, 5) can be moreover identified with the Romantic concept of the poet as genius, whose imagination is capable of reconciling the irreconcilable (“[who] bends the most remote and opposite things”; Barbauld 2008: l. 6), i. e. capable of creating an organic unity as demonstrated, for example, in Coleridge’s concept of esemplastic imagination (Coleridge 1973: 195)²³⁵ or in William Blake’s theory of contraries (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Not least, the magician fusing the elements along with the emphasis given to the “Thrice locked and bolted [iron door]” (Barbauld 2008: l. 2) echoes Coleridge’s similarly antithetic “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 36)²³⁶ created by “Kubla Khan”, around whom the speaker would “Weave a circle […] thrice” (Coleridge 2001b: l. 51). Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that Barbauld conceives Romantic aesthetics explicitly as archival practices together with images/discourses of the archive, thereby disclosing their close relation. This idea is continued in the subsequent depiction of the “genial board”. The fullness of the “melting peach, the nectarines smooth” and the “crimson veins / of the moist berry” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 22, 24– 25) foreshadow the fullness and excessiveness of Keats’s “To Autumn” (Armstrong 1995: 15). Whereas Keats describes in the latter a movement from “products of labor and culture” (Armstrong 1995: 15) back to nature, Barbauld, in contrast, traces a movement where natural objects are turned into cultural artefacts in the course of their archiving (Armstrong 1995: 14– 15); similar to the Keatsian frozen moment, language and imagination are employed here to literally and figuratively freeze their natural objects, to timelessly conserve them within their poetic archive, metaphorically figured as an ice-house. Hence, she re-reads Romantic aesthetics (that claim to be grounded in nature and beyond civilisational artifice) as being unnatural in how they impose (male) archival law onto natural objects, turning them into cultural artefacts “[t]o do him [man, the great magician; D.K.] service and perform his will” (Barbauld 2008: l. 7). This aesthetic revision further extends itself to Barbauld’s implicit discussion on Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime. As Isobel Armstrong argues, the poem destabilises Burke’s dichotomic distinction between the male sublime and the female beautiful. Whereas the sublime is identified in the poem with personified winter (also conventionally a “sublime season”; Armstrong 1995: 18) and  Anna Barbauld met Coleridge in Bristol in 1797 (McCarthy and Kraft 1994: 296). She later composed the poem “To Mr. S. T. Coleridge” (1797), both praising and criticising him; in particular, warning him not to get lost in “the maze of metaphysical lore” (Barbauld 1994: l. 34).  See also Armstrong (1995: 14) for the reference to Coleridge’s caves of ice.

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gendered masculine, the beautiful is represented by the fruits of the genial board. Their eroticised voluptuousness, fragility and smoothness allude to the Burkean attributions of the (female) beautiful, that is, to the “weakness and imperfection [which] contribute to the lack of power and the sickness with which we associate the beautiful” (Armstrong 1995: 18). In contrast to Burke’s dichotomic distinction, however, winter becomes in Barbauld’s poem “fair Pleasure’s minister” (Barbauld 2008: l. 20), i. e. subordinated to the feminine beautiful. This destabilisation is further emphasised through winter’s intertextual identification with “fettered Sampson” (Barbauld 2008: l. 15) (whose hair, after having been deceived by Delilah, is cut; a symbolic act of castration, resulting in the loss of his strength and imprisonment) and Hercules’s condemnation as a slave to Omphale, who made him “s[it] / Midst laughing girls submiss, and patient twirled / The slender spindle in his sinewy grasp” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 17– 19) – a demasculinisation that undermines the sublime/male and beautiful/female opposition (Armstrong 1995: 17– 19). In other words, Barbauld not only reverses the sublime/beautiful power relation coupled with their respective gendering but does this most notably by adding new documents (the intertexts) to the existing (discursive) archive. In so doing, she both criticises the patriarchal substructures of the Romantic ideology and suggests an aesthetic reconciliation of the masculine and feminine.²³⁷ Finally, the poem itself stages the aesthetics of female and masculine reconciliation, thereby sharing its indebtedness to the notion of the archive (fever) and exploring its paradoxical qualities. As has been shown, she repeatedly uses images of repositories (e. g. the cell, cave, or ice house) accompanied by words that connote the archival act with the imposition of (male) repressive power structures (e. g. “locked and bolted”, “vaults with ponderous stone”, “confined”, “treasured snows”; Barbauld 2008: ll. 2, 3, 3, 10), altogether functioning as metaphor for (male) Romantic aesthetics and practices of technology/science. At the same time, however, her re‐writing of the male archive follows the same (male) discursive strategies as the very title of the poem already suggests – i. e. an “Inscription” in the sense of the Derridean concept of exergue and its exertion of hermeneutic authority – and as can be seen by the archive’s extension through the outlined intertextual allusions; in this regard, her various references to the Burkean sublime and beautiful have to be underlined as further intertextual re‐writes of his concepts. Through this she not only integrates the female aesthet See Newlyn (2000: 158): “She [Barbauld; D.K.] teases her readers of both sexes with the possibility of an aesthetic which mediates between the masculine and the feminine (each needing the other for its completion) while at the same time offering a sharp and specific critique of the assumptions which underlie Romantic ideology.”

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ic of the beautiful into the sublime, but also coordinates the feminine and masculine on a more general level in that women as “bearers and preservers of life” (Armstrong 1995: 21), as figured by the feminine gendering of the fruits, cooperate with (male) technology, both encapsulated within the images of the genial board and the ice‐house (Armstrong 1995: 21– 22). This reconciliation, however, turns out itself to be precarious as the spectrality of the archived objects suggests, indicating the presence of the archive’s fever. These objects inhabit a liminal status within the ice-house/poem with reference to their metaphorical values and oppositions (nature vs. culture/technology; masculine vs. feminine; stasis/preservation vs. elusiveness): nature is confined and exploited by man, transformed into cultural artefacts, but eventually unbound “rul[ing] the year” (Barbauld 2008: l. 31). And although Barbauld stages a mediation between the beautiful and the sublime, the (feminine) beautiful is nevertheless locked together with winter by man in the ice-house, thus relativising female empowerment and foregrounding women’s vulnerability (Armstrong 1995: 19; see also 31). From a metapoetical perspective, winter’s fleetingness and the ensuing reversal of the power relation between the poet and nature serve to undermine the (hubristic) absoluteness of Romantic aesthetics and the artist as genius. (Wo)man cannot control “Fire, earth and air, and genii of the storm, / And bend[ ] the most remote and opposite things” (Barbauld 2008: ll. 5 – 6) since the sublime, figured as winter, cannot be fully controlled or subdued in its relation to the (poetic) archive. The same is true by implication for the reconciled female and male aesthetics within the metaphor of the genial board: amid the frozen (archived) moment of the congealed fruit also lies the temporality of winter’s (i. e. the sublime’s) inscribed fleetingness – similar to the fullness and excessiveness of the fruit in Keats’s “To Autumn”, which ultimately allude to loss and death. As such, stasis and elusiveness, conservation and destruction, presence and absence, paradoxically lie together and unfold the archived objects’ spectrality. Against this backdrop, the “Inscription” of the poem’s title can be read as a metaphor for the precarious materiality of writing, regarding the present poem as archive and, by extension, as written archival practices in general. Not only is language/writing unable to permanently and hermeneutically fix its objects (as could be seen from the aforementioned deconstruction of the poem’s aesthetics, or the poem’s general movement from stasis to elusiveness/ temporality, alluding to the linguistic sign’s spatialisation and temporalisation), but it is also subjected to future recontextualisations and re-inscriptions as, for example, the supplementation through various intertextual references suggest. In short, there is a strong self‐reflexivity in Barbauld’s reconciled aesthetics, shedding critical light on her own archival practices and discourses, which ex-

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tend from mere aesthetics to the materiality of the poem, i. e. its writing and situatedness within a (potentially unlimitedly proliferating) body of documents. With that said, we can finally conclude that the ambiguities of the epoch are echoed in the spectrality of these archived objects: on the one hand, the latter hints at the exclusion of women as active participants within the male domain (s) of science/technology and, indeed, at Barbauld’s own ambivalent position towards it: “The shifting borderlines in Barbauld’s writings between insistence on knowledge for all and acceptance of female limitations exemplify her culture’s ambiguities about nature, gender, and knowledge” (Bellanca 2003: 53). On the other hand, it discloses the underlying gender hierarchies and limits of (the emerging) Romantic aesthetics, which strive for naturalness and absolute (hermeneutic and aesthetic) control over their objects but which are ultimately unmasked as unnatural and elusive – a proto-deconstructive thrust which is very much characteristic of British Romanticism, and which is both expressed and explored by Barbauld through the notion of the archive (fever).

1.2 Charlotte Smith, “Beachy Head” (1807) Essentially grounded in the cultural-discursive presence of the archive (fever) and archival practices, Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (published posthumously in 1807) continues to explore the issues raised in Barbauld’s “Inscription for an Ice-House”, albeit providing a further twist by giving strong focus to the aspect of materiality. Visually, the copious notes in the poem’s paratext stand out. At the time of its publication, the poem featured these as endnotes instead of footnotes (which are used in the most recent editions). As correspondence between Smith and her publisher reveals, however, she would have preferred footnotes (Reinfandt 2013: 107). The footnotes/endnotes are basically of an explanatory nature (yet also provide further differentiating and subversive voices; Bode 2008: 252) with regard to the main body of the poem. The latter revolves around her attempt(s) at conceiving and describing the eponymous chalk cliffs of East Sussex, thereby enlarging upon the relationship between science, nature and aesthetics (which was likewise a dominant theme in Barbauld’s poem), historiography, natural history and – most notably – the materiality of its medium, writing. In so doing, she not only echoes the epoch’s Zeitgeist of archive fever but also critically engages with dominant notions of (male) Romanticism, thus testifying and contributing to Romanticism’s heterogeneity – a heterogeneity that is, however, embedded within the phenomenon of archive fever and its functioning as a superordinate cultural‐discursive frame of reference.

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For one thing, Smith’s “Beachy Head” is a product of the epoch’s institutionalisation of the sciences and its related attempts at gathering, systematising, classifying, processing and ordering knowledge; in short, essential archival acts resulting in the production and publication of numerous encyclopaedias, dictionaries, historiographic studies and so forth. Theresa M. Kelley identifies these tendencies as an “epistemological anxiety” (2004: 310) mirrored in contemporary debates about classifications and terminology (2004: 309 – 310), emerging from the “era’s epistemological and cosmic desire to map all species, to assign resemblances such that no detail of natural history anywhere on the globe would lack a local habitation and a name in a grand scheme” (Kelley 2004: 310). With regard to “Beachy Head”, I will argue that Kelley’s notion of “epistemological anxiety” (2004: 310) should rather be seen as epistemological melancholia insofar as the numerous classifications result in a sense of loss that eventuates in a feverish (melancholic) desire to archive; this desire striving to compensate for lack/absence but, in the end, again perpetuating the preconditions of the loss through the archival act. For another thing, the poem is embedded within the flourishing culture of print that replaced “the pre-modern regime of a metaphysical real” (Reinfandt 2013: 112) with a “modern physical real” (Reinfandt 2013: 112). As Reinfandt (2013: 104, 106, 111– 112) argues in this regard, the materiality of Smith’s poem, its “texture”²³⁸ (in this case: writing/print) connects it to the history of mediation, unveiling the “changing ‘ontological holds’ on the real which depend on new forms of media technology” (Reinfandt 2013: 112). Against this backdrop, I contend in the following section that the “epistemological anxiety” (Kelley 2004: 310) expressed in “Beachy Head” and the poem’s materiality are both symptoms of the epoch’s archive fever – a decisive part of its history of mediation – and a meta‐commentary on these processes. It will be shown that the relationship between the general and the particular, between abstract archival practices and concrete ones (in particular the materiality of writing/print), together with their contingency constitute central aspects of the poem. These are explored, starting from a loco‐description of Beachy Head similar to (yet also decidedly different from) William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, through questions of epistemology, aesthetics, subjectivity and materiality. *** Charlotte Smith’s approach to her object is – just like the object itself, the chalky cliffs of Beachy Head – multi-layered. A pivotal technique can be identified in

 For Reinfandt’s concept of “texture”, see Reinfandt (2013: 101– 105).

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her historical approach, which, on the one hand, follows the generic conventions of grand historical narratives in the tradition of Edward Gibbon (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776 – 1788); and on the other hand, breaks with such all‐encompassing aspirations by focusing on local particularities (Kelley 2004: 287– 288; Knezevich 2016: 1). These disruptions are further reinforced by various instances of fragmentation, unveiling the aesthetic of the scientific‐historical and the scientific-historical of the aesthetic, overall reflecting the contingency of the archival act. A closer look at the poem’s beginning and its multiple relations to its other (heterogeneous) parts shall exemplify this: On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o’er the channel rear’d, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails, I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. Imperial lord of the high southern coast! From thy projecting head-land I would mark Far in the east the shades of night disperse, Melting and thinned, as from the dark blue wave Emerging, brilliant rays of arrowy light Dart from the horizon; when the glorious sun Just lifts above it his resplendent orb. Advances now, with feathery silver touched, The rippling tide of flood; glisten the sands, While, inmates of the chalky clefts that scar Thy sides precipitous, with shrill harsh cry, Their white wings glancing in the level beam, The terns, and gulls, and tarrocks, seek their food, And thy rough hollows echo to the voice Of the gray choughs, and ever restless daws, With clamour, not unlike the chiding hounds, While the lone shepherd, and his baying dog, Drive to thy turfy crest his bleating flock. The high meridian of the day is past, And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven, Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low The tide of ebb, upon the level sands.

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The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still, Catches the light and variable airs That but a little crisp the summer sea. Dimpling its tranquil surface. (Smith 2012: ll. 1– 36)

The poem begins with a notably aestheticised apostrophe to Beach Head: while Beachy Head is identified in terms related to the (male) sublime (e. g. “thy stupendous summit, rock sublime” [Smith 2012: l. 1] or as alluded to through the Wordsworthian “murmurs” in line 31, with which he commonly indicates the presence of transcendence), the spaces depicted describe a temporal movement from dawn (“brilliant rays of arrowy light / Dart from the horizon; when the glorious sun / Just lifts above it his resplendent orb”; Smith 2012: ll. 15 – 17) to (after) noon (“the high meridian of the day is past”; Smith 2012: l. 29) and eventually through to the setting of the sun and night (“the fair star, that as the day declines / Attendent on her queen, the crescent moon, / Bathes her bright tresses in the eastern wave. / For now the sun is verging to the sea […] The early moon distinctly rising, throws / Her pearly brilliance on the trembling tide”; Smith 2012: ll. 72– 75; 98 – 99). These spatial semantics suggest a sense of linearity, closure and completeness, i. e. dawn, (after)noon and dusk/night representing the beginning, middle and ending respectively, or the “Ocean […], reflecting, the calm Heaven” (Smith 2012: l. 30) during (after)noon, implying a conflation of macro- and microcosm and a strong sense of transcendental inclusiveness. Moreover, Beachy Head is initially situated within mythical-religious origins, i. e. the speaker attempts to […] represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. (Smith 2012: ll. 5 – 10)

As Christoph Bode argues, the poem constructs here a beginning from which all its differentiations that follow are derived (2008: 251– 252); or, as I would argue, albeit in a slightly different manner, the passage discloses an archival fever by setting out to excavate the object’s absolute origins, its archaic imprint, within the mode of imagination. At the same time, however, Smith prosaically resolves this religious metaphor by adding a note (see also Bode 2008: 252) according to

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which the cited passage “allud[es] to an idea that this Island was once joined to the continent of Europe, and torn from it by some convulsion in Nature” (Smith 2012: note 3 on p. 59). Such historical notes are scattered throughout the whole text, most notably in the section where Smith reviews the historical origins of Beachy Head (lines 119 – 166). The passage begins with an invocation of personified memory, “bid recording Memory unfold / Her scroll voluminous – bid her retrace / The period, when from Neustria’s hostile shore / The Norman launch’d his galleys” (Smith 2012: ll. 199 – 122), followed by an historical outline spanning from the Normans to the Battle of Beachy Head (1690). The apostrophe’s explicit identification of memory with writing links the section to the materiality of print and the generic tradition of historiography. Accordingly, the primarily historical yet decisively aestheticised passage (as can be found, for example, among the numerous apostrophes, personifications, metonymies and allusions) of the main text is explicated by the sober, fact-bound tone (Reinfandt 2013: 110) of five footnotes/endnotes (two of them being extensive) that provide the historical context. In other words, Smith’s approach to her object not only follows the discourses and materiality related to contemporary archival practices (i. e. historiography and print), but she also exerts her archival (hermeneutic) authority over the very document by supplementing it with the addition of copious amounts of notes. These brief examples represent a central structuring element of the poem, namely the self-reflexive coordination of the scientific-historical with the imaginative‐aesthetic. That is, the poem alternates between highly aestheticised sections and dominantly historical ones (extending to the footnotes/endnotes), the latter of which adheres to contemporary models and aspirations for all‐encompassing grand historical narratives that give primary focus to politics and nation.²³⁹ By such means, the historical is reflected through the aesthetic and the aesthetic through the historical. On the one hand, the imaginative-aesthetic exploration of Beach Head at the poem’s beginning mirrors the underlying archival ideology of grand historical narratives: that is to say, the archival desire for linearity, originality, closure, completeness. Not least, it also hints at the masculine gendering²⁴⁰ of these narratives as implied by their identification with the Burkean sublime inasmuch as “a sublime viewpoint is male and god-like in its capacities” (Kelley 2004: 294). As such, they also allude to the fact that grand  See Kelley (2004: 287– 288), who identifies major historical models in the poem, that is, “the grand march of history” (2004: 287) and an “attention to human and natural particularities that are insistently local” (2004: 288).  See also Labbe (2003: 144 ff.), who describes the speaker in lines 1– 117 as “masculinized ‘I’” (2003: 147).

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historical narratives in the vein of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were (and should be) exclusively the works of male authors.²⁴¹ On the other hand, the historical-scientific notes equally comment on Romantic (sublime) aesthetics inasmuch as they mirror the totalising and all-encompassing tendencies of sublime Romantic aesthetics alike. A further example to underscore this reflection on the aesthetic through the scientific-historic are the numerous (forty-two in total) annotations containing botanical information²⁴² that interrupt Smith’s aesthetic depiction of nature. The following passage shall exemplify this: An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine; I loved her rudest scenes—warrens, and heaths, And yellow commons, and birch-shaded hollows, And hedge rows, bordering unfrequented lanes Bowered with wild roses, and the clasping woodbine Where purple tassels of the tangling vetch With bittersweet, and bryony inweave, And the dew fills the silver bindweed’s cups.— I loved to trace the brooks whose humid banks Nourish the harebell, and the freckled pagil; And stroll among o’ershadowing woods of beech, Lending in Summer, from the heats of noon A whispering shade; while haply there reclines Some pensive lover of uncultur’d flowers, Who, from the tumps with bright green mosses clad, Plucks the wood sorrel, with its light thin leaves, Heart-shaped, and triply folded; and its root Creeping like beaded coral; or who there Gathers, the copse’s pride, anémones, With rays like golden studs on ivory laid Most delicate: but touch’d with purple clouds, Fit crown for April’s fair but changeful brow. (Smith 2012: ll. 346 – 367)

Many critics have pointed out the similarities between the passage’s beginning (“An early worshipper at nature’s shrine”; Smith 2012: l. 346) and William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (where he describes himself as “[a] worshipper of Nature”; Wordsworth 2000a: l. 231) together with his manner of depicting nature (e. g. Anderson 2000: 560). I want to shift the attention to the subtle differ-

 See Kelley (2004: 288) for the male domain of grand histories.  See Knezevich (2016: 4) for a statistic survey of Smith’s notes regarding natural history.

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ences between both quotations, namely Smith’s usage of the image of “nature’s shrine”. Besides referring to the sacred/religious quality of nature (i. e. being a sacred place), the image also conveys the notion of a physical repository housing various objects of worship. The line thus metapoetically hints at the subsequent enumeration of flowers as an aesthetic archival act, i. e. an excessive quasi‐religious gathering of objects. This is further highlighted by six annotating notes, which systematically classify the flowers according to the Linnaean taxonomy (for example, “Bittersweet. Solatium dulcamara. Bryony. Bryonia alba” or “Harebell. Hyacinthus non scriptus. Pagil. Primula veris”; Smith 2012: notes 1 and 3 on p. 67). In so doing, Smith lays bare the historical-ideological and material substrate of Romantic aesthetics,²⁴³ i. e. the flourishing culture of the archive and archival practices (here, the feverish desire for systematisation, classification and completeness as echoed in the passage’s picturesque²⁴⁴ gathering of flowers) – a substrate that is ultimately visualised by the materiality of the poem (its texture²⁴⁵), that is, by the footnotes/endnotes being physically positioned beneath the main text. *** Up to this point, I have demonstrated how the poem constructs a sublime re‐imagining of Beachy Head that runs parallel with the similarly allencompassing aspirations of grand histories (as evidenced both in passages of the main text and particularly in the footnotes/endnotes) and scientific classificatory models. Both approaches, as different as they may appear at first sight, coincide with each other in their abstract archival ideologies and in how they utilise the dominant archival practices of the epoch, i. e., scientific (historiography and natural history) and aesthetic (in this regard, see also the sublime spaces discussed in chapter III). These archival practices, however, are simultaneously called into question by the poem’s self‐reflexive and fragmentary structure. Although the temporal and epistemic scope at the beginning of the poem, conveyed through the movement from morning to (after)noon and evening/ night, suggests completeness/closure, the passage also implies the dissolution of its representational frame and object. That is, the all-encompassing and sublime, male viewpoint is repeatedly interrupted by (female) attention to the local  Conversely, it also mirrors the aesthetics of scientific discourses for “popular Romantic writing on botany rarely let opportunities pass for making the lives of plants highly figurative” (Kelley 2004: 307).  See Kelley (2004: 301) for the poem’s picturesque mode.  For the concept of “texture”, see Reinfandt (2013: 101– 105).

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and particular,²⁴⁶ as can be seen, for example, in the references to the “lone shepherd, and his baying dog” or “a fleet / Of fishing vessels” (Smith 2012: ll. 27, 38 – 39). Tellingly, this movement from morning to evening/night is only to be located at the beginning of the poem (ll. 1– 99), being immediately followed by a section which focuses on the local and ephemeral, i. e. on “[t]he fishermen, who at set seasons pass / Many a league off at sea their toiling night” (Smith 2012: ll. 100 – 101). This trajectory establishes a counter‐narrative to the model of grand history and structurally implies the idea of its incompleteness. This fracture between the macro and micro level,²⁴⁷ between diachronic and synchronic approaches and between universal history and particular histories is continued in many instances throughout the whole poem; for example, when Smith digresses from “the proudest roll by glory fill’d” (Smith 2012: l. 167) (referring to the previously discussed passage of Beachy Head’s historical origins in lines 119 – 166, and meta‐poetically addressing the genre of historiography together with its materiality) to a “lone farm” (Smith 2012: l. 171) with its shepherds in the present. The historical counter-model is additionally paralleled by a self-reflexive critique placed on (male) sublime aesthetics, with focus given to the (feminine) beautiful instead. The following passage, taken from the first part of the poem and which marks the transition from (after)noon to evening and night, shall exemplarily illustrate this: […] As Heaven’s pure air, Fresh as it blows on this aërial height, Or sound of seas upon the stony strand, Or inland, the gay harmony of birds, And winds that wander in the leafy woods; Are to the unadulterate taste more worth Than the elaborate harmony, brought out From fretted stop, or modulated airs Of vocal science. – So the brightest gems, Glancing resplendent on the regal crown, Or trembling in the high born beauty’s ear, Are poor and paltry, to the lovely light Of the fair star, that as the day declines, Attendant on her queen, the crescent moon,

 See Kelley (2004: 288 – 289, 293 – 294) for these different historical models in “Beachy Head” and their female and male gendering..  See Kelley (2004: 287– 288) for the idea of historical macro and micro levels (in “Beachy Head”).

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Bathes her bright tresses in the eastern wave. For now the sun is verging to the sea, And as he westward sinks, the floating clouds Suspended, move upon the evening gale, And gathering round his orb, as if to shade The insufferable brightness, they resign Their gauzy whiteness; and more warm’d, assume All hues of purple. There, transparent gold Mingles with ruby tints, and sapphire gleams, And colours, such as Nature through her works Shews only in the ethereal canopy. Thither aspiring Fancy fondly soars, Wandering sublime thro’ visionary vales, Where bright pavilions rise, and trophies, fann’d By airs celestial; and adorn’d with wreaths Of flowers that bloom amid elysian bowers. Now bright, and brighter still the colours glow, Till half the lustrous orb within the flood Seems to retire: the flood reflecting still Its splendor, and in mimic glory drest; Till the last ray shot upward, fires the clouds With blazing crimson; then in paler light, Long lines of tenderer radiance, lingering yield To partial darkness; and on the opposing side The early moon distinctly rising, throws Her pearly brilliance on the trembling tide. (Smith 2012: ll. 60 – 99)

The section begins with an extended simile (lines 60 – 74), in which Smith compares the inadequacy of manmade instruments (“fretted stops”) and vocals (“vocal science”) to mimic the sounds of nature with the aesthetic inferiority of jewellery faced with the beauty of “the fair star […] Attendent on her queen, the crescent moon” (Smith 2012: ll. 72 – 73). Through the metonymical connection between the stringed instruments/vocals and lyric poetry/imagination, she criticises the totalising and transcendental aspirations of sublime Romantic aesthetics, that is, their pretensions to re-enact nature’s sublimity. Besides not being able to archive its object (the sublime quality of nature as figured by “Heaven’s pure air” with its suggested transcendentality), such aesthetics are – similar to Anna Barbauld’s critique in her “Inscription for an IceHouse – also exposed as being unnatural. That is to say, the simile builds upon the opposition between nature and its representation through cultural artefacts (nature’s sounds vs. artificial music played on instruments compared

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with the beauty of the planet Venus/the moon vs. crafted jewellery), stressing both the inferiority and artificiality of the latter. This idea is also conveyed in the image of the “modulated airs / Of vocal science” (Smith 2012: ll. 67– 68), which hints – in close relation to the aforementioned example in which the footnotes/endnotes that contain Linnaean taxonomy supplement the picturesque gathering of flowers – at the underlying technological/artificial substrate (i. e. the discursive and material presence of the archive, the “science”) of the alleged natural aesthetics (its “vocal[s]” mimicking the sounds of nature). Finally, the sublime aesthetics that are here spatially represented by daytime – also note the personification of the sun and its explicit male gendering, making reference to Apollo – make way for the night, which Smith links to femininity through mythological allusions (the moon is gendered as female and refers to Diana; the “fair star” [Smith 2012: l. 72], within this intertextual context, referring to Venus/Aphrodite). As a side note, we likewise find such an identification of sublime, all-encompassing aesthetics with the sun and the related mythological Apollo in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn of Apollo”, in which he mockingly (especially when read in contrast to the “Hymn of Pan”) presents the god’s totalising and phallic discourse: The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day; […] I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself, and knows it is divine; All harmony of instrument or verse, All prophecy, all medicine, is mine, All light of art or nature; – to my song Victory and praise in its own right belong. (Shelley 2011: ll. 13 – 14, 25 – 30)

Turning our attention back to Smith’s poem, the sunset/night section is accordingly marked by the predominantly female aesthetics of the beautiful, breaking with the “masculinized ‘I’” of Labbe’s (2003: 147) reading. This becomes evident in the picturesque and sensual depiction of the colours the sunset casts on the natural scenery (see lines 75 – 99, which delight in the enumeration and delicacy of bright and glittering colours). Obviously, this recalls (or rather foreshadows) John Keats’s sensual use of language, which contemporary critics (following the Burkean distinction between the male sublime and female beautiful) have discounted as weak and effeminate (Roe 1997: 10 – 16), considered typical of such a “cockney

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poet”. The passage eventually culminates with the image of “[t]he early moon distinctly rising, throws / Her pearly brilliance on the trembling tide” (Smith 2012: ll. 98 – 99), which self‐reflexively marks the transition of the aesthetic mode from the sublime to the (female) beautiful. What then follows is, consistently, the corresponding (female-gendered) historical model as demonstrated in a short digression to the particular and local (“[t]he fishermen, who at set seasons pass / Many a league off at sea their toiling night”; Smith 2012: ll. 100 – 101). Overall, Charlotte Smith self-reflexively uses and problematises dominant archival practices and archives of the period. These comprise competing historiographical models (local/particular vs. grand historical narratives), natural history in conjunction with its systematics of classification, scholarly annotations/editorial commentary as materially manifested in the numerous footnotes/endnotes, and – not least – (Romantic) aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful. To the same extent that the two historical models turn out to be irreconcilable (Kelley 2004: 293, 302, 311– 314), the aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful are also juxtaposed (not least due to their association/identification with the respective and oppositional historical models). Although this association/identification may suggest a sense of identity/unity, they are nevertheless fractured by the underlying difference between science and imagination/aesthetics; the scientific (historical and botanical) footnotes/endnotes in the paratext exert their interpretative authority²⁴⁸ over the main text, breaking with Romantic notions of organicism (Reinfandt 2013: 107– 108) and suggest the incompleteness of the aesthetic mode as an all‐encompassing archive for its object. At the same time, however, Smith’s critique of the aesthetics of the sublime is likewise a critique against its scientific counterpart (i. e. historical grand narratives, but also classification systems) whose (unattainable) archival ideology of completeness, classification and closure is exposed. Moreover, the female aesthetics of the beautiful and its particularities (and, consequently, the correspondent feminine historical model) turn out to be an equally inchoate archive. This can be seen, for example, in the picturesque depiction of flowers (ll. 346 – 367) cited above, which is not only undermined by the botanical notes supplementing (and fragmenting) the deficient depiction but also within the main text, i. e. in the part that follows immediately after where Smith highlights the aesthetic elusiveness of Beachy Head: “Ah! Hills so early loved! in fancy still / I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold /  See Knezevich (2016: 4): “Annotations […] offer the writer with a greater range of authorizing maneuvers. They can establish authority for the poet’s voice via that of an editor, setting a tone for interpretation – even telling the reader how to read specific passages by pointing out allusions or references to other texts or cultural events.”

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Those widely spreading views, mocking alike / The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art” (Smith 2012: ll. 368 – 371). The subsequent passage – which answers the questions raised earlier regarding the origins of the sea-shells and also echoes contemporary scientific theories on the subject (“Does Nature then / Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes […] Or did this range of chalky mountains once / Form a vast basin, where the Ocean waves / Swell’d fathomless?”; Smith 2012: ll. 378 – 384) – in turn criticises (complementarily to the critique on the historical models) the limited capacities of science: Ah! very vain is Science’s proudest boast, And but a little light its flame yet lends To its most ardent votaries; since from whence These fossil forms are seen, is but conjecture, Food for vain theories, or vain dispute (Smith 2012: ll. 390 – 394)

As a result, neither the various scientific-historical models nor the various registers of (Romantic) imagination turn out to be suitable archives for their objects. This shared incompleteness undermines the commonly established Romantic opposition between science and imagination, according to which the latter is able to frame the object’s essence beyond scientific rationality and classification. On the contrary, Smith’s coordination of these models not only exposes – as has been argued above – their mutual entanglement (i. e. their archival ideology) but also the overall deficiency of such archival acts, resulting in the “epistemological anxiety” (Kelley 2004: 310) that constitutes both the effect and origin of the archival fever displayed. *** Finally, the archived object itself (the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head together with its vegetation) represents a powerful metaphor for the poem’s and the archives’ materiality, i. e. writing/print. “Beachy Head” abounds in such self‐reflexive moments, which refer to the medium of inscription as well as to the physical act of inscribing. The poem’s ending relating to the death of the hermit, which has been read by various critics as an indication of its fragmentary, incomplete structure,²⁴⁹ also ambiguously refers to itself:

 See, for example, Holt (2014: 10 – 11) and Kelley (2004: 312– 313).

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At day-break, anxious for the lonely man, His cave the mountain shepherds visited, Tho’ sand and banks of weeds had choak’d their way.– He was not in it; but his drowned cor’se By the waves he wafted, near his former home Receiv’d the rites of burial. Those who read Chisel’d within the rock, these mournful lines, Memorials of his sufferings, did not grieve, That dying in the cause of charity His spirit, from its earthly bondage freed, Had to some better region fled for ever. (Smith 2012: ll. 721– 731)

Accordingly, “these mournful lines [chisel’d within the rock]” (Smith 2012: l. 727) may not only hint at a missing part of the poem (thus placing it within the tradition of the genre of the fragment), but most notably at the (mediality/materiality of the) preceding text, the poem as a whole (Bode 2008: 255 – 256; Reinfandt 2013: 111). Following Christoph Bode (2008: 255, 259), Beachy Head is both tenor and vehicle, signified and signifier. Similar ambiguities can be found in the stranger’s rhapsody to Amanda (ll. 577– 654), i. e. a further poem/document stored within the superordinate poem/poetic archive “Beachy Head”: I’ll contrive a sylvan room Against the time of summer heat, Where leaves, inwoven in Nature’s loom, Shall canopy our green retreat (Smith 2012: ll. 613 – 616)

Here, the poly-referential “leaves” denote both the natural scene and the rhapsody itself, i. e. paper as a medium of writing (Bode 2008: 254– 255). The latter is moreover suggested by the spatial metaphor of the “canopy”, conveying the idea of a physical repository. Against the backdrop of the references to contemporary archival practices that have been analysed above, both examples further unveil the poem’s indebtedness to the notion of the archive, its discourses and imagery. In particular, they show that “Beachy Head” is not only a poem about archival practices and their ideologies, but also about the/its very archival medium and the act of inscribing. This idea is further continued in the recurring images of Beachy Head’s erosion and sedimentation, which simultaneously figure the poem’s archival structure. Against the backdrop of the discussed ending, in which the poem is explicitly associated with the chalk cliffs, the preceding depictions of Beachy Head

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acquire an additional metapoetic dimension in view of the poem’s materiality. A representative passage for this is Smith’s reflection on the seashells’ origins: Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance. […] Or did this range of chalky mountains once Form a vast basin, where the Ocean waves Swell’d fathomless? What time these fossil shells, Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment Grew up a guardian barrier, ‘twixt the sea And the green level of the sylvan weald. (Smith 2012: ll. 373 – 375, 382– 389)

Smith not only vividly pictures the seashells’ fossilised forms but also situates them within the chalky and fractured cliffs of Beachy Head, thus, in a more abstract‐metapoetical sense, linking the act of inscribing/preserving an object (the fossils) with the poem as material archive (as represented by Beach Head). What follows a few lines later is, consequently, a speculation on the cliff’s various layers and their archival spatialisation of time²⁵⁰: As little recks the herdsman of the hill, Who on some turfy knoll, idly reclined, Watches his wether flock, that deep beneath Rest the remains of men, of whom is left No traces in the records of mankind. Save what these half obliterated mounds And half fill’d trenches doubtfully impart To some lone antiquary; who on times remote, Since which two thousand years have roll’d away, Loves to contemplate. He perhaps may trace, Or fancy he can trace, the oblong square Where the mail’d legions, under Claudius, rear’d The rampire, or excavate fosse delved; What time the huge unwieldly Elephant Auxilliary reluctant, hither led, From Afric’s forest glooms and tawny sands, First felt the Northern blast, and his vast frame

 See Bode (2008: 258), who argues that the passage spatialises time.

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Sunk useless; whence in after ages found The wondering hinds, on those enormous bones Gaz’d; and in giants dwelling on the hills Believed and marvell’d.– (Smith 2012: ll. 399 – 418)

The passage is remarkably metapoetical on two accounts; firstly, the chalky cliff’s sedimentation is reminiscent of the materiality of the present passage. That is, the succeeding written lines embody various geological layers and are accordingly linked to more and more distant temporal “fossils”. These start on the surface of the present moment (the herdsman watches his flock unaware of the deep layers beneath the surface; ll.399 – 401), extending over two thousand years (including remains of the country’s natives, the Romans under Claudius, Elephant bones) until they eventually conclude by locating their mythical origins (giants). Moreover, the four footnotes/endnotes (Smith 2012: notes 1– 4 on page 69) Smith includes within this passage (giving more historically detailed information on the burial mounds of the natives, on the legions of Claudius or on the discovery of elephant bones and how they came to Britain) constitute a further material layer of the passage by being physically located under the poem. Secondly, the passage also represents the poem as a whole, the “lone antiquary” – who “[l]oves to contemplate” and “trace” (Smith 2012: ll. 406, 408, 409), to excavate these layers and preserve them – also being the archivist of the present poem who, in a similar fashion, feverishly excavates the various layers of Beachy Head. In other words, the passage both comments on the poem’s fever to archive its object (Beachy Head), i. e. to excavate its origins and preserve it in its essence, and at the same time mirrors the poem’s material/archival structure, namely its fragmentary (in the sense of ‘sedimentary, stratified’) form. The latter is composed by Smith’s coordination of various historiographic genres (natural history, grand historical narratives, local history), intertexts (such as Cowper, Milton and Smith’s own works)²⁵¹, aesthetics (sublime vs. beautiful, picturesque etc.)²⁵² and, not least, by numerous footnotes/endnotes. The particular use of notes in the literature of the period constitutes, as Ruth Knezevich argues, a literary genre of “women’s scholarly verse” (2016: 14). In fact, there was a considerable increase in annotations/(foot)notes in women’s poetry over the course of the 18th century until the early 19th century (Knezevich

 See, for example, Anderson (2000: 552– 574) or Kelley (2004: 302– 304).  See Reinfandt (2013: 109): “The first half of ‘Beachy Head’ thus provides a compendium of poetic modes from Neoclassicism through Sensibility into Romanticism”.

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2016: 3).²⁵³ These developments not only reflect, as Knezevich notes, 18th century professionalisation and empiricism (2016: 3), but also, as I contend, the epoch’s fever to archive; that is, the poem’s materiality is strongly intertwined with the history of mediation, manifesting in manifold archival practices. By writing from the paratextual margins, women finally had the opportunity to engage in (scientific) male discourses from which they had commonly been excluded (Knezevich 2016: 1, 4, 12– 13). Put differently, women appropriate here archival practices (annotating and evaluating documents via the use of the “authoritative voice” of footnotes; i. e. the exertion of the “nomological principle” [Derrida 1995: 9]) in order to participate in and modify the male archive (understood as a predominantly male scientific/empiric discourse, materialising in various scholarly documents such as the grand natural histories that were previously discussed). Despite the presence of all these archival practices, nevertheless, the metaphor of Beachy Head also involves the archive’s precarious materiality. This can be accounted for by the image of the chalky cliffs, demonstrating how that which can be timelessly preserved are merely traces, imprints, sediments, fossils – a materiality that indicates its own insufficiency,²⁵⁴ as also suggested by the presence of numerous and various archival acts, indicating the archive’s fundamental incompleteness. It is this fragmentary, sedimentary structure²⁵⁵ of “Beachy Head” which both exposes and juxtaposes the various archival models, ultimately indicating their incommensurability and inability to frame their object; in short, the contingency of the archival act. The poem as archive thereby unifies these various archival practices/archives while also, within the same act of consignation (i. e. “to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration”; Derrida 1995: 10) exposing the fundamental heterogeneity²⁵⁶ of its objects. The latter

 As Knezevich concedes, “[n]one of this is to say that male writers were not incorporating annotation into their verses or that only women could write in this genre” (2016: 13). Yet, this form of annotating provided women authors a powerful means to participate in many typically male discursive domains (Knezevich 2016: 1).  See Bode (2008: 256 – 257), who primarily relates this idea to the self-constitution of the subject through language.  See also Anderson (2000: 550 – 552, 574), who argues that “Beachy Head” belongs to the genre of the so-called “dependent fragment” inasmuch as it is constituted as an “elliptical and self-referential collage” (2000: 551), a “fragment of fragments, fashioning a mosaic of broken tiles” (2000: 551).  See also Reinfandt, who argues that the various speaking positions are presented without hierarchy and organisation: “’Beachy Head’ does not try to ‘naturalize’ simulated speaking positions, but uses the medium of print to induce reflexivity by putting various speaking positions

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thus comprise not only the spectrality of the archived object, the cliffs of Beachy Head, but also – on a superordinate level – the spectrality of the various (archived) archives, showing that the archive is a potentially endless process of (hermeneutic and material) supplementation, and consequently de- and re‐contextualisation. *** To conclude this section, the material texture of “Beachy Head” (as evidenced by its fragmentary structure, the footnotes/endnotes, its writing/print in general) together with its coordination of various historical models, aesthetics and scientific classificatory systems constitutes a reflection of, and meta-commentary on, contemporary archives and archival practices. Firstly, the poem makes explicit the epoch’s fever to archive. This manifests itself, on the one hand, within the microstructure of the analysed passages, as can be seen in the various acts of gathering and systematising, the desire to re-construct historical/ mythical origins and the implied notions of completeness – all of these aspects being materially and discursively embedded within contemporary archival practices (also comprising aesthetics). This desire for wholeness, thought to be achievable through excessive accumulation, is, on the other hand, equally reflected in the poem’s macrostructure. By gathering together various scientific and aesthetic archival models (the poem thus also being an archive of the latter), Smith’s poem strives to apprehend its object with the help of a multitude of aesthetic and scientific‐historical frames of reference, therefore, continuously supplementing its archive – a supplementation that materialises most notably in the abundant use of annotations/notes. Secondly, “Beachy Head” exhibits the archive’s (self‐)destructive tendencies by way of its indication that such an excessive degree of supplementation, in fact, testifies to the object’s absence. This is a result of the processes of de- and re‐contextualisation (which are inherent to the concept of the archive), the closely related differential nature of writing/language and, not least, the precarious materiality of the medium (print) as suggested by the metaphoric identification of the poem with the sedimentation and erosion of the cliffs. Within this polyphony of voices and related archival practices, Beachy Head is, in the end, only present through fleeting traces, that is, in a spectral form. The same is true for the speaker, whose identity/subjectivity – contrary to Labbe’s reading which argues that the speaker accomplishes the construction of a stable (Romantic) self (2003: 8 – 9, 19) –

(which are normally naturalized in their various discursive contexts) next to each other as segments or layers in a seemingly neutral texture” (2013: 111).

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is, following Christoph Bode, only manifested in differential and fleeting moments given the precariousness of the mediality and its discourses out of which (and through which) it tries to constitute itself (2008: 256, 258). Seen from this perspective, “Beachy Head” not only exposes the important role of the archive within the history of mediation in the 18th to early 19th century, but it ultimately indicates the influence of the archive on the “staging and construction of the modern subject” (Reinfandt 2013: 112).²⁵⁷

2 Genre and Archive Fever Thus far, the nexus between genres and the notion of archive fever has only been discussed in the literary analyses implicitly or as a side issue. In Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the genre of the epic along with the underlying motif of journey echoes the period’s archival ideology as manifested in a feverish gathering of cultural artefacts and, through this, in a similarly (melancholic) obsession with origins. In Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, the discussion of the sublime reveals defining elements of the genre of the fragment. Not only does the poem constitute a fragment due to its textual incompleteness located within an absent totality as indicated by the supplementing preface, but also its internal fractures (deferred signifiers, fragmentary mirror structures etc.) clearly situate it within this genre. Similar to the supplementing paratext of “Kubla Khan” (i. e. its preface), the various glosses in the balladic “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also have a fragmenting effect insofar as they equally imply an unfinished text that lacks closure (reinforced by its circular structure), and which is open for potentially unlimited supplementations (e. g. the grafting of religious frames of reference). In this regard, Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” is also notable, with its central metaphor of the eroding chalk cliffs and their sediments meta‐poetically reflecting the poem’s fragmentary structure and its composition through a contingent coordination of various archival practices; in particular, historiographic genres, intertexts, aesthetics and supplementing footnotes/endnotes in the paratext. Keeping

 See Reinfandt, who argues that the texture of “Beachy Head”, i. e. “the poem’s particular mediation of ostensibly objective reference to the world through mimesis of observation as well as intermediality […] and intertextuality on the one hand and its mediation of the subjective experience of the world as staged in voices with their respective modes of speaking on the other represent paradigmatic positions of modern authorship. These in turn illustrate opportunities for staging and constructing the modern subject, which at the same time turns out to be subject to (rather than the subject of) communication and discourse as well as prone to deconstruction through sheer multiplicity” (2013: 111– 112).

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in mind the perspective of genre, these various instances of fragmentation indicate that the poem as an archive is inherently incomplete, fragmentary and spectral. In William Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems and John Keats’s Odes, the use of genres primarily reflects the melancholic disposition of the archiving subject. While the various genres (ballad, romance, epitaphs etc.) in the Lucy-Poems are used as narrative frames, signalling Lucy’s/the Thing’s unrepresentability, the elegy plays an important role in “Lucy Gray” insofar as it foregrounds the speaker’s failed quest according to which – and contrary to the genre’s given conventions – the lost object is not successfully sublimated but, instead, melancholically incorporated. The melancholic’s feverish, narcissistic attachment to the lost object is finally figured through the genre of the ode. In John Keats’s odes, the ode serves both as a vehicle for the melancholic’s ambivalent relishing of the loss (e. g. the celebration of the loss’s re-enactment in “Ode on Melancholy” or his enjoyment of “honied indolence” [Keats 2000 g: l. 37] in the “Ode on Indolence”) and as a self‐reflexive metaphor for the act of introjection in which the subject becomes an archive (e. g. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or “Ode to Psyche”). In the following analyses, attention will be directed explicitly to the use of genres and their relation to the concept of archive fever. For this purpose, I shall scrutinise two examples which I consider as paradigmatic for British Romanticism: first, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s appropriation of the sonnet in “Ozymandias” within the context of the materiality of print and writing. This genre strikes me as particularly relevant since it was precisely in the late 18th and 19th centuries when the sonnet experienced a massive revival, resulting in a downright “Sonnet craze” (Duff 2009: 14), which was paralleled by the flourishing culture of print. Second, I will look at the fundamental Romantic genre of the fragment in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel”. The latter is closely intertwined with the fragmentary use of various other genres (such as the gothic, ballad, romance, allegory etc.), used by Coleridge to critically explore generic frames of reference and their materiality as precarious archival practices and archives.

2.1 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and the Sonnet When Shelley, together with his friend Horace Smith, wrote on the subject of Ozymandias, he might not have been aware that his take on the Egyptian emperor

Note: A version of this chapter (ch. V.2.1) was previously published by De Gruyter: Kerler, David. “Genre and Archive Fever in Romantic Poetry: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ’Ozymandias’ and the Son-

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would also reflect the notion of the archive (fever) along with its ambivalences. His sonnet, which was published in Leigh Hunts’s The Examiner in 1818, very likely took its cue from Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica (last century BC). Siculus relates the famous inscription on Ozymandias’s statue reading “I am Osymandias, king of kings” (Griffiths 1948: 81), which inspired Shelley to reinterpret this sculptural demonstration of power, as a warning statement on hubris and the transience of tyrants, empires, and power (Griffiths 1948: 80 – 81; Ferber 2007: 69; Stephens 2009: 155). If we add another document to this archive of the poem’s creation, further interpretative layers of interest can be revealed beyond its obvious political readings. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ozymandias was, as Walter Stephens shows, regarded as the “first founder of libraries than as hubristic despot” (2009: 160). This view can be traced back to the German scholar Burkhard Gotthelf Struve (1671– 1738) and his influential study Introduction to the Knowledge of Literature and the Use of Libraries (1754), which was subsequently supplemented by other scholars and republished posthumously for decades. In this work, for Struve “as for generations of scholars before him, Ozymandias was synonymous with libraries and the attempt at preserving human memory through writing” (Stephens 2009: 158). This association primarily owed to the fact that Ozymandias was considered to have built the first library (though it was more probably merely a simple bookshelf) and placed the inscription “Healing-Place of the Soul” on it (Stephens 2009: 158 – 160, 165 – 166). By his choice of Ozymandias as subject, Shelley’s poem, hence, not only comments on a historical period that was profoundly marked by the sobering experiences of the French Revolution and the rise and fall of political powers, but also on a period that was concerned with historical origins and the idea of the archive. Especially in the context of Ozymandias as mythical founder of libraries, it is remarkable that the museum experienced its formative phase precisely between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Bennett 2002: 19; Underwood 2012: 238 – 239). The development of the museum must also be situated within the period’s rapidly growing material and visual culture, which reflected both the epoch’s technological developments and the emphasis placed on the gathering and exposition of cultural artefacts that had been collected abroad (for example, within the context of the famous Grand Tour) (Thomas 2012: 87– 97, 101– 102). These collections were further complemented by an increasing number of historiographic studies and archaeological

net”. In: David Kerler and Timo Müller (eds.). Poem Unlimited: New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. 17 – 29.

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expeditions, echoing Europe’s infatuation with (national) history and the past (Fricke 2009: 32 – 37; Underwood 2012: 229). The statue of Ozymandias that Diodorus may have had referred to (though it did not bear such an inscription), for instance, was brought to the British Museum shortly after the poem’s publication (Stephens 2009: 164). Finally, these developments were flanked by the proliferating print culture of the time (Belanger 1982: 6 – 7; Feather 2006: 98 – 99), which provided a medium – an archive – for disciplinary discourses (e. g. within the context of books, magazines, periodicals etc.) and contributed to making the results accessible to a broader audience (Flieger Samuelian and Schoenfield 2012: 72). As I shall argue in the following section, Shelley appropriates the sonnet genre in order to explore the epoch’s desire to archive as well as the precarious nature of archiving process and contemporary archives. By scrutinising the precarious nature of archiving processes with the help of the sonnet tradition, Shelley’s poem not only critically revises its own structures – a self-reflexivity that has always been typical of the sonnet genre (Wagner 1996: 72–73) – but also reflects contemporary archival concerns arising from this “new age of paper” (Stauffer 2006: para. 8), namely “the fragility of the material and the vast quantities of it” (Stauffer 2006: para. 14). “Ozymandias”, thus, further mirrors Shelley’s own archival desire (that is, “achieving immortality through print publication”; Marotti and Freiman 2011: 76) in the light of an overarching archival anxiety, surfacing as a result of the precarious materiality of paper and writing. *** Given that Ozymandias was regarded as the mythical founder of libraries, the poem’s title – its inscription – already hints at an underlying metadiscourse on the contemporary preoccupation with origins, originals, and (their) various archives. This metadiscourse extends itself to genre since the history of the sonnet is also the history of its medium (Marotti and Freiman 2011: 66 ff., 74– 75). The “Sonnet craze” (Duff 2009: 14) of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must be considered with respect to the period’s rapidly emerging print culture and the related increase of a public readership – a materiality that affects Shelley’s appropriation of the sonnet form and which is deeply indebted to the notions of the archive (fever). From an intratextual point of view, “Ozymandias” originates in an archival fever, manifesting itself in a desire to possess the object in its originality and to defy the destructive effects of temporality. This can be seen on the poem’s various narrative levels; firstly, within the embedded narrative of the traveller who gives account of the destroyed statue of Ozymandias. The statue represents a piece of art that was supposed to timelessly preserve (that is, spatially archive)

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the power of the Egyptian pharaoh while also capturing the essence of his character. In other words, the sculptor strived to archive the object in its originality beyond its mere physical appearance insofar as he “well those [Ozymandias’s] passions read” (Shelley 2012: ll. 5 – 6). Also noteworthy in this quote is Shelley’s use of the verb “to read”, which further unveils the discursive presence of the dominant print culture and its materiality. Secondly, the archival fever can also be located in the framing narrative in which the traveller’s tale is embedded, that is, in its poetical archive. For this purpose, Shelley tellingly chooses the genre of the sonnet – a literary form that has been traditionally used to timelessly preserve its materials. Most notably within the context of Elizabethan love poetry and heavily influenced by Neo-Platonic ontology, the sonnet was thought to transcend the object’s outer, physical appearance and to eternalise its essence. It therefore seems to provide the perfect frame for Shelley’s ekphrastic depiction of the statue, in the course of which he tries “to make his words outlast their ostensible subject, to displace graphic representation with verbal representation” (Heffernan 1991: 311). Hence, the difference between framing and embedded narrative already alludes to an opposition between writing and visual art – an opposition that also extends to the difference between the framing/archiving genre and its object. Notwithstanding this opposition, there are striking metapoetical similarities between the sculptor and the poet. Just as the sculptor “stamped on these lifeless things” the aforementioned “passions” (Shelley 2012: ll. 7, 6), the poet stamps the traveller’s tale into the sonnet form.²⁵⁸ With the verb “to stamp”, Shelley again uses the language of materiality, which turns out to be revealing for his metadiscourse on print culture, the archive, and their relation to the sonnet genre. According to Derrida, the notion of “impression” refers to the pivotal act of the archiving process, that is, to “the moment proper to the archive, […] the instant of archivization” (1995: 22), as it describes the very moment of the substrate’s inscription. In other words, the sculpture is both a spatial archive of Ozymandias’s power and a metaphor for the archiving process of the poem in which its genre and the image of the sculpture constitute tenor and vehicle, respectively. Further, as the semantics of the sonnet form pass on the idea of eternalness (that is, as its generic tradition is architextually grafted on the object), Ozymandias’s passions “yet survive” (Shelley 2012: l. 7) within their spatial and poetic archive, both of them suggesting the presence of the archived material.

 See also Fricke (2009: 179).

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These archives are, nevertheless, fragile constructions subjected to destructive forces. As a further look at the poem reveals, Ozymandias’s presence is accompanied by a strong sense of loss. Not only is the materiality of the spatial archive (the sculpture) affected by the destructive forces of temporality, but its physical decay also leads to a re‐contextualisation of the archived material. What remains are only “[t]wo vast and trunkless legs of stone” and a “shattered visage” of the “colossal wreck” (Shelley 2012: ll. 2, 4, 13), which, if at all, only bear metonymical traces to the Egyptian king. The hubristic inscription (the “king of kings” [Shelley 2012: l. 10] and his works) stands in ironic contrast to this decay, the surrounding empty desert (“The lone and level sands stretch far away” [Shelley 2012: l. 14]), and, not least, to the larger scale of history which attests to the transience of Ozymandias’s power. The same is true for the statue’s superordinate textual archive, the poem and its genre. At first sight, one might be tempted to say that the textual wins over the architectural in that the statue is timelessly preserved in the present sonnet, the latter, therefore, constituting “a poetic monument” (Janowitz 1984: 487) to the monument (Janowitz 1984: 478 – 479, 487– 489; Ferber 2007: 73). As a closer look reveals, however, the archived object is highly mediated and absent: first, there is the sculptor who “those passions read” (Shelley 2012: ll. 5 – 6) and who subsequently carves them into the statue; second, the traveller, who discovers the statue, reads the inscription and narrates his tale to the speaker; and, finally, we have the poet, who grafts the sonnet form on this material (Heffernan 1991: 310 – 311; Bode 1994: 147; Wagner 1996: 71). As a result, the supposed presence of the archived object turns out to be multiply deferred and fragmented within this palimpsestic structure, bearing traces of its different imprints and archival acts. Turning to Derrida, we can say that the iteration of the (linguistic) sign, its various de- and recontextualisations, inevitably leads to a break with its former communicative and semantic contexts, resulting in the aforementioned textual and contextual ironies in view of the monument’s original message (Derrida 2001b: 184; Derrida 2001a: 26 – 29, 32, 34– 35, 40). What was originally intended to epitomise Ozymandias’ power and achievement is ironically inverted over the course of its various (textual) iterations and archivings (Heffernan 1991: 310 – 311; Bode 1994: 148; Janowitz 1984: 485 – 486). Language emerges as a precarious archiving medium since the sign’s spatialisation and temporalisation via repetition comes to establish the source of its own effacement – a process that Derrida (2005a: 287– 299; 2016: 6 – 18; 2005b: 332– 339) delineates with his concept of différance. With his emphasis on the temporal aspect, Shelley revises the sonnet’s characteristic mnemonic structure, that is, it being a “moment’s monument” (Rossetti 1880: l. 1) that aims to achieve closure (Wagner 1996: 71– 74) – a sense of closure that we find, for example, in the Word-

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sworthian sonnet with its “longing to dwell, transcendentally or immanently” (O’Neill 2011: 196). Instead, the poem’s archiving process, its medium and its genre are marked by a fundamental incompleteness and openness for future recontextualisations. These characteristics not only constitute the self‐destructive aspect of the archive but also kindle the fever to archive. This archival fever manifests itself in the various attempts to permanently fix the object, visually and in written (poetic) form – attempts that can be seen as supplements to the deficient archival act. Beyond the narrative instances previously indicated, we finally have Ozymandias himself who speaks indirectly via the pedestal’s inscription. But even his alleged quote is a problematic written archive since Shelley’s material sources are themselves fragmented and deferred: Diodorus refers to Egyptian archives that, “if they ever existed, vanished long ago” (Stephens 2009: 163). And, as Stephens (2009: 163 – 164) further shows, it is also questionable whether Shelley actually read Diodorus’s book or just a fragment of it within the work of another author. Diodorus’s Bibliotheca Historica was “for many centuries a lost library, containing shreds of even older losses” (Stephens 2009: 163) and up to this day many of its parts are still missing. Put differently, it is an archive that has been affected by its own precarious materiality. Moreover, the statue that was brought to the British Museum did not bear the aforementioned inscription (Stephens 2009: 163 – 164). As such, Shelley might indeed have been inspired by various (incomplete) sources but nonetheless enriched them by way of his own imagination. The poem’s critical history, however, is characterised by a downright fever to excavate and archive its origins, echoing the theme of the poem. As Christoph Bode (1994: 143) notes in this regard, “[t]he critical history of ‘Ozymandias’ is almost exclusively the history of the quest for its sources, its origins, textual or extratextual”. Turning back to the intratextual level of the poem, it is striking that even the sonnet structure decays in a similar manner to that of the statue. On the one hand, the poem cites some of the sonnet’s characteristic formal elements, such as its fourteen lines, the volta (though it is placed here after the eleventh line), or the Shakespearean sonnet’s rhyme scheme (abab) at the beginning. On the other hand, the first quatrain is followed by an additional a-rhyme that eventually turns into terza rima (cdc ede fef). Through the dizziness of the terza rima and the various slant rhymes (for example stone/frown, appear/ despair/bare; Shelley 2012: ll. 2, 4, 9, 11, 13) the poem’s form figures the dissolution of its content. The ekphrastic depiction of the decaying statue equally mirrors the decay of its poetical archive, its genre, further undermining the dominance of the textual over the visual. And just as Ozymandias’s spatial archive inhabits a liminal position between memory and its destruction, the sonnet

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structure is present and absent at the same time, its structural traces loosely held together by alliterations, consonances and assonances. The frequent use of fricatives (especially in lines 2, 4 and 7) onomatopoetically evokes through their airflow the trickling of the sands of time, that is, a temporality which affects both sculpture and text: “time will erode the traces not only of tyranny but also of art” (O’ Neill 2011: 198). From this perspective, the poem’s paratext grafts another subversive context onto the archived material, which is similar to Ozymandias’s quote on the statue’s pedestal: read as founder of libraries, “synonymous […] with the attempt to preserve human memory through writing” (Stephens 2009: 158), “Ozymandias” as the poem’s title ironically comments on (and mocks) the poet’s futile, maybe even hubristic, attempt at defying the destructive effects of temporality through poetic imagination and the sonnet genre. *** Shelley’s “Ozymandias” inhabits a precarious position between the conflicting poles of (genre) memory, loss and archival desire. It originates from an archival fever to timelessly possess the origin(al) and is followed by an ambivalent concurrency of the object’s (re‐)construction and its subsequent destruction. The destructive movements manifest themselves most notably in various forms of repetition (such as the highly mediated object within its various spatial and textual archives), in the resulting de- and recontextualizations and, not least, in the language system’s differential structure that emerges from the linguistic sign’s spatialisation and temporalisation in the course of its iteration. The same applies to Shelley’s appropriation of the sonnet genre inasmuch as it suffers a dissemination through its iteration, that is, by citing and thus archiving it: impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence. All these disruptive “anomalies” are engendered […] by repetition. One might even say by citation or re‐citation (ré-cit) (Derrida 1980: 57– 58)

As a result, both the poem as archive and its archived object(s), including the generic tradition of the sonnet, are characterised by a paradoxical presence/absence. It is within this liminal point, i.e. between the threshold between (genre) memory and its loss, between the archive and its destruction, between the fever to archive and the archive’s fever, where the archive’s spectral nature comes to the fore (Derrida 1995: 14). Finally, Shelley published “Ozymandias” not only within the context of a rapidly growing print culture and the related expansion of the reading public (Marotti and Freiman: 74– 76), but also within the epoch’s revivification (headed

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by Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets) of the sonnet form which had been heavily marginalised since John Milton’s death (Curran 1986: 29 – 30; Duff 2009: 15). As such, in light of the poem’s theme, Shelley’s use of the sonnet genre might have been equally indebted to a further form of archival fever in that it excavates the (ruins of) the long forgotten sonnet tradition.²⁵⁹ The numerous publications of sonnet anthologies – such as William Sharp’s Sonnets of the Nineteenth Century (1886), Sir Arthus Quiller-Couch’s English Sonnets (1897) or Leigh Hunt’s The Book of the Sonnet (1867) – over the course of the 19th century (Duff 2009: 14– 15; Marotti and Freiman 2011: 77– 78) testify that this archival fever regarding genres also had a lasting impact beyond the Romantic period. The construction of such archives played an important role in the formation of British collective identity²⁶⁰ insofar as “the frequent appearance of English sonnet collections […] throughout the British Empire with the sonnet as the epitome of English poetic form reflects a new confidence in the dominance of English national identity” (Marotti and Freiman 2011: 77– 78). Against this backdrop, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” retrospectively grafts a further ironic context onto the sonnet form: read as epitome of British imperial self‐confidence – a hubris metapoetically reflected in Ozymandias’s “Look on my works ye Mighty and Despair” (Shelley 2012: l. 11) – the decaying sonnet form in Shelley’s poem also mirrors Britain’s loss of imperial power and dominance throughout the course of the following centuries.

2.2 The Fragment: Coleridge’s “Christabel” The fragmentary structure of the sonnet form in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, as also embodied by the Pharaoh’ s statue itself, can be thematically linked to the motif of the fragment and, in particular, to the very genre of the fragment. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” – written in two parts in 1797 and 1800, and eventually published in 1816 – is a paradigmatic example of this fundamental Romantic genre and, not least, of the latter’s relation to the notion of the archive (fever). Although not a genuine Romantic invention (one might think of the non finito of the Renaissance, the abundance of ruins in the literature of the 18th century, or the fake manuscripts of Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson) (Schmitt  See also Duff’s general remark on Romantic uses of genre, according to which “[t]o use a literary genre was to render perceptible the sediment layers, to build up across time, which constitute that genre; to renew […] the ‘archaic elements’ that lay buried within” (2009: 145).  For the archive’s general relation to the constructions of (collective) identities, see Lubar (1999: 14– 16); Cook (2007: 169 – 181); Craven (2008: 8 – 12).

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2005: 15 – 17), the fragment nevertheless enjoyed its heyday during Romanticism with, for example, John Keats’s Hyperion, Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, Byron’s The Giaour or the initially discussed “Beachy Head” (Smith) and “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge). The fragment being basically defined as a piece of work that is part of/refers to an absent totality/wholeness, “Christabel” can be regarded as such from both an extratextual and intratextual perspective:²⁶¹ On the one hand, Coleridge’s correspondence with his publisher Thomas N. Longman (26 March 1801) reveals that he intended the poem to consist of five parts, as opposed to the two parts that were actually published in 1816: I should rather wish to send forth a Poem first, which I have reason to believe, from the concurring testimony of all the Persons to whom I have submitted it, is more likely to be popular than any thing which I have hitherto written – . It is in length about the size of the Farmer’s Boy, and I shall annex to it two Discourses, Concerning Metre, & Concerning the Marvellous in Poetry – / […] The title of the Poem is CHRISTABEL, a Legend, in five Books. (Coleridge 1966: 715 – 716)

This is also supported by the preface of its first publication, in which he declares that there are “three parts yet to come” (Coleridge qtd. in McElderry 1936: 437; see also McElderry 1936); later versions of the preface, however, lack this assertion. Both examples constitute supplementing documents that, as will be shown later, extend the poem’s archive and hermeneutic scope. On the other hand, the poem’s internal structure itself is utterly fragmentary and incomplete as indicated, for instance, by its lack of narrative closure together with numerous ambiguities and ruptures (generic, structural and semantic) (Levinson 1986: 77; Schmitt 2005: 162– 170). “Christabel” consists of two parts, each one containing a conclusion, and is preceded by a preface where Coleridge mainly explains his peculiar use of metre. The first part begins with Christabel going into the woods around midnight to pray for her lover. Near an old oak tree, she suddenly hears Geraldine crying for help, saying that she was abducted by five men. Christabel takes Geraldine to her chamber in the castle of her father, Sir Leoline. Christabel reveals that her mother died in childbirth and that her spirit is watching over her. Both women undress and go to bed when Christabel suddenly beholds Geraldine’s unspeakable mark: “Behold! Her bosom and half her side – / A sight to dream of, not to tell! / O shield her! Shield sweet Christabel!” (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 252–  For the definition of the fragment and the distinction between an extratextual and intratextual fragment poem, see Schmitt (2005: 13 – 15, 19 – 25).

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254). Thereafter, Geraldine casts a spell upon Christabel that prevents her from talking about what she has just seen. The following conclusion primarily summarises these events and describes how Christabel sleeps in Geraldine’s arms. The second part begins with Christabel waking up with an awareness that “’Sure I have sinn’d!’” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 381). We also learn that Sir Leoline has decreed a law according to which every day a bell would be tolled in order to remember his wife’s death: Each matin bell, the Baron saith, Knells us back to a world of death. These words Sir Leoline first said, When he rose and found his lady dead: These words Sir Leoline will say Many a morn to his dying day! (Colerdige 2000c: ll. 332– 337)

Christabel brings Geraldine to her father, Sir Leoline. Not only does he immediately command that the perpetrators be punished, but he also recognises Geraldine as the daughter of his long forgotten and estranged friend, Lord Roland. Sir Leoline considers this as an opportunity to reconcile with Lord Roland and sends Bard Bracy to deliver the news and an invitation. Bracy hesitates because he had a dream in which a dove was attacked by a snake, insinuating that they represent Christabel and Geraldine. Christabel also suddenly has a vision of Geraldine with snake‐like features and urges her father to dismiss Geraldine, yet not being able to directly tell him what she saw the night before due to the spell. However, Sir Leoline ignores both and keeps Geraldine at his castle, angrily rebuking his daughter and sending Bracy to Lord Roland. The narrative ends here and is followed by a second conclusion in which the speaker reflects on the innocence of childhood and how parental affection can lead to negative emotions. The abrupt and incomplete ending of the narrative along with its numerous ambiguities has brought forth a variety of readings. Religious interpretations, for example, evaluate the poem as Calvinistic in that the characters’ “collective failings illustrate […] the immanent limitations of the human spirit” (Dramin 1982: 225); or, in contrast, relate it to a Unitarian Christianity by stressing the problem of will/choice over the notion of original sin regarding the question of the origins of evil (Ulmer 2007). Others (Nelson 1980) take Christabel’s name, being composed of “Christ” and “Abel”, as a starting point to argue for a dissolution of opposites, indicating the Book of Genesis “by restoring an original lost unity–the elusive genesis of our being” (Nelson 1980: 388). Psychoanalytical readings primarily focus on the Doppelgänger motif. Whereas Christian la Cassagnère con-

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ceives of Geraldine as an uncanny personification of Christabel’s repressed unconscious and as an instance of the Lacanian Real (La Cassagnere 2001: 86 – 87), William A. Ulmer identifies her as a Doppelgänger of both Christabel and her mother. Accordingly, “the heroine can access her own sexuality (Geraldine as Christabel’s unconscious, the site of libidinal energy) only through her mother (Geraldine as maternal icon)” (Ulmer 2007: 391). Moving beyond this intratextual level, the conflict of the poem has also been interpreted as a displaced reflection of Coleridge’s difficult relationship with his own mother (Ulmer 2007: 392– 393). Finally, even the poem’s genre is subjected to various classifications; in particular, it has been read as (Mock‐)Gothic (La Casssagnere 2001: 84; Dramin 1982), suggesting that Geraldine resembles the classic Gothic villain or even a vampire (Dramin 1982; Ulmer 2007: 388), as Romance and Tragedy (Levinson 1986: 77– 96), and, not least, as Romantic fragment (Schmitt 2005: 160 – 170; Nelson 1980: 375 – 378). Notwithstanding these readings, I want to focus in the following section on the self‐reflexive and metapoetical dimension of the poem. In particular, it will be argued that “Christabel” critically engages with the idea of genres as an archive and archival practice, further extending these arguments to an analysis of the precarious materiality of the (written) signifier. The poem’s fragmentary form, as will be argued, constitutes a material manifestation of the archive (fever) in that it not only visualises the various genres’ – and, from a superordinate perspective, the archive’s – inherent incompleteness and differential structure, but it also indicates the subject’s fever to archive through its relation to/implication of an absent totality. *** The central aspect of the poem is not (only) Christabel’s mysterious story but, first and foremost, its mediation through a multitude of generic conventions (Schmitt 2005: 162; Levinson 1986: 78 – 81). For this purpose, Coleridge employs various genres which function as archives which graft their classificatory and hermeneutic structure onto the narrative/their object. In other words, they exert the archive’s “archontic power” (Derrida 1995: 10), which crucially shapes its object to such an extent that the act of storing is also an act of destruction. At the same time, however, Coleridge also self‐reflexively exposes the modulative character of such genres, overall unveiling the archive’s liminality between modes of preservation and destruction. A major genre which pervades “Christabel”, and with which several of its other genres are closely entangled, is that of Gothic fiction. From the very beginning of the poem, there is critical engagement with these conventions as appropriate narrative frames for the unfolding of the story:

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PART I ’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu—whit! Tu—whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: ’Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 1– 22)

Echoing contemporaries such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) or Ann Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Coleridge introduces the reader to a scenery that features numerous Gothic topoi: set at midnight, moody depictions of night and moon, combined with the intermingling sounds of the castle clock, owls, cocks and howling dogs. Yet, these generic elements are presented in an ironic way. A cacophony of sounds (and, in a metonymical sense, also a hyperbolic cacophony of Gothic genre elements), the cock is crowing “drowsily”, the mastiff bitch is “toothless”, “old” and howls “not over loud”, altogether leavening the suggested sinister atmosphere.²⁶² Moreover, having re-evaluated the scene, the speaker concedes that the “night is chilly, but not dark” and the moon is covered by a grey cloud looking “both small and dull”, which further undermines the generic expectation and initial suggestion of a sombre mood. The speaker’s question (“Is the night chilly and dark?”), which precedes this re-evaluation, thus al See Dramin (1982: 222– 223) and La Cassagnere (2001: 84) for the ironic playing with Gothic clichés.

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ready alerts the reader to critically question²⁶³ the narrative rendering. By self‐reflexively qualifying these depictions, which are considerably stylised through their references to generic elements, Coleridge exposes them as (empty) generic/narrative conventions that utterly shape and distort their object, ultimately being unable to capture/archive the object in its totality. On a related note, a similar rhetoric strategy can be also seen in his poem “The Nightingale”, where he first refers to the nightingale as “Most musical, most melancholy’ bird” (Coleridge 2001c: l. 13), alluding to John Milton’s “Il Penseroso”, only then to immediately debunk it as an empty convention, “A melancholy bird? Oh! idle thought! / In Nature there is nothing melancholy” (Coleridge 2001c: ll. 14– 15). The spatial introduction to the poem’s peculiar Gothic mode is eventually followed by the appearance of the character of Christabel and her Doppelgänger Geraldine, who lie at the thematic centre of Coleridge’s appropriation of the Gothic and other genres. Throughout the narrative, Christabel and Geraldine undergo a remarkable process of de- and recontextualisation, emerging from the repeated grafting of various generic conventions. At first, Geraldine is represented as the stereotypical damsel in distress: There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare; Her blue-veined feet unsandl’d were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. I guess, ’twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she— Beautiful exceedingly! (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 58 – 68)

Metaphorically dressed in the Gothic conventions previously introduced (as suggested by the moonlight that shines on her, i. e. she is illuminated by the Gothic conventions stereotypically associated with the moon at the beginning of the poem), she represents female vulnerability: “Beautiful exceedingly”, dressed in a white robe symbolically suggesting innocence, and terrorised by five men,

 See also O’Neill (2001: 74): “’Why does the person telling this story ask this question?’ […] Or does he do it to invite us to probe and question everything we are told?” See also La Cassagnere (2001: 85), who interprets the speaker’s questions as an act of “unrealization”.

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Geraldine desperately seeks the help of Christabel, who comes to assume the role of the Gothic heroine. Yet, as already indicated by the self‐reflexive and ironic citations of Gothic genre elements at the beginning, the object eludes its homogenising narrative frame. By the end of the second part, Christabel assumes the role initially prescribed to Geraldine insofar as it is now Christabel who seems to be the helpless, vulnerable damsel in distress threatened by the evil forces of Geraldine.²⁶⁴ Taking this position, Geraldine displays features of the Gothic villain since she both dissembles her true character under the guise of acting like a damsel in distress and further tries to corrupt Christabel’s innocence, thereby featuring parallels to Satan, the deceiver and seducer, in Milton’s Paradise Lost. ²⁶⁵ However, Geraldine’s classification as villain falls short insofar as she nonetheless constitutes a figure within the narrative through whom other characters benefit from positive encounters: firstly, it is through Geraldine that Sir Leoline initiates his re‐union with his “best brother” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 417), Lord Roland (Nelson 1980: 383 – 385, 387), freeing “the hollow heart from paining” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 420); secondly, it is because of Geraldine that Sir Leoline begins to detach from his compulsive, pathological fixation on his dead wife (as figuratively embodied by the daily tolling of the bells, which constantly makes present his wife’s death/the lost object’s loss instead of deferring it onto an Ersatzobjekt, as the work of mourning would require it): Then [the Baron; D.K.] turned to Lady Geraldine, His eyes made up of wonder and love; And said in courtly accents fine, […] He kissed her forehead as he spake, And Geraldine in maiden wise Casting down her large bright eyes, With blushing cheek and courtesy fine (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 566 – 575)

Christabel’s subsequent vision of Geraldine as a snake can be, from a psychoanalytical perspective, explained by her equal fixation on her dead mother,

 For the circularity of the poem’s beginning and ending with the inverted roles of Geraldine and Christabel, see Schmitt (2005: 166 – 167).  For Geraldine as a Gothic villain and her similarities to Satan of Paradise Lost, see Dramin (1982: 224).

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who is, tellingly, constantly watching over her as a spirit. This fixation can be traced to Christabel’s feelings of guilt regarding her mother’s death and her father’s constant mourning, overall resulting in a compulsion to take on the role of her mother (Ulmer 2007: 381, 390). Hence, her subsequent perception of Geraldine as a deceiving, evil snake – who assumes the role of the mother – is owing to her religious frames of reference that she grafts onto the threat of losing her mother (already lost but not yet successfully sublimated) and, not least, the threat of losing her father, additionally revealing traits of the Electra complex. In particular, Geraldine represents here Christabel’s ambivalent Doppelgänger in that she both mirrors (Ulmer 2007: 377, 379, 388; La Cassagnere 2001: 87) and threatens her repressed sexual desires. This may also explain why Sir Leoline is so enraged by Christabel’s urge to send Geraldine away, i. e. because she is motivated by “more than jealousy” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 646), motivating him to action as the symbolic/patriarchal law. Thirdly, it is through Geraldine that Christabel can, at least temporarily, detach from the mother and act out her repressed sexual desires. This becomes evident in the first part where Geraldine exorcises the spirit of Christabel’s mother (“’Off, woman, off! this hour is mine – / Though thou her guardian spirit be, / Off, woman, off! ‘tis given to me’”; Coleridge 2000c: ll. 211– 213), before she suggestively invites Christabel to likewise undress and lay beside her in the bed. Read from a psychoanalytical perspective, Geraldine’s quarrel with the mother’s spirit could be seen as a figuration of Christabel’s attempt to sublimate her own compulsive attachment to the mother (also, in this context, note that Christabel’s lover, the knight, is absent from the beginning onwards). Then again, this detachment (i. e. the sexual encounter between Christabel and Geraldine) is at the same time conveyed as problematic. This is not only suggested by Christabel’s restless sleep and her awareness that she has sinned, but, first and foremost, by Geraldine’s representation as a Doppelgänger of the mother (Nelson 1980: 389; Ulmer 2007: 377, 390 – 391). Examples of this can be found in the aforementioned parallels of the second part, or by the fact that Christabel sleeps in Geraldine’s arms, holding “the maiden […] / As a mother with her child”; Coleridge 2000c: ll. 299 – 301). Further unveiling the Electra complex indicated above, Geraldine constitutes a multiply displaced form of the father (father -> mother -> Geraldine as her Doppelgänger), whom Christabel sexually desires.²⁶⁶  See also Ulmer (2007: 391): “the heroine can access her own sexuality (Geraldine as Christabel’s unconscious, the site of libidinal energy) only through her mother (Geraldine as maternal icon). […] The poem conjures the mother amid its sexually charged bedroom scene because […] Geraldine enacts Christabel’s oedipal desire to commandeer her mother’s relationship with Leoline”.

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The unspeakable mark of shame that Christabel beholds in Geraldine is, therefore, a reflection of her unconscious/oedipal desire, her own mark of shame, which she cannot put into words. In other words, it is the oedipal narrative that neither she nor the other characters (and the narrator) can symbolise, overall engendering the various generic frames of reference they continuously graft on it. With this perspective in mind, Christabel turns out to be not as innocent as numerous critics have interpreted her to be (Ulmer 2007: 378 – 379). Instead, she is “more of an innocent seducer than a seduced innocent” (Dramin 1982: 223) – an ambivalence that is suggested both structurally (Geraldine being a Doppelgänger of Christabel and her mother) and generically (e. g. by the ironic use of Gothic genre elements, such as the phonetic ambivalence of the words “pray”/ “prey” in Christabel’s exaggerated stress about praying [Dramin 1982: 223], therefore subverting the role suggested for her as generic Gothic heroine). This psychoanalytical reading of Christabel’s narrative eventually leads us to the genre of the allegory. In the second part, bard Bracy hesitates to go to Lord Roland because of his allegorical dream: So strange a dream hath come to me, That I had vowed with music loud To clear yon wood from thing unblest, Warned by a vision in my rest! For in my sleep I saw that dove, That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, And call’st by thy own daughter’s name – Sir Leoline! I saw the same Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, […] ‘And in my dream methought I went To search out what might there [in the forest; D.K.] be found; And what the sweet bird’s trouble meant, […] I stooped, methought, the dove to take, When lo! I saw a bright green snake Coiled around its wings and neck. […] And with the dove it heaves and stirs, Swelling its neck as she swelled hers! (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 527– 554)

The passage is remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, it is remarkably metafictional inasmuch as the bard also represents the poet of the current poem, including its

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potential for allegorical interpretation²⁶⁷ in the course of the reader’s actualisation (as exemplarily shown in the preceding psychoanalytical reading). Secondly, in a self-reflexive manner it simultaneously comments on the potential ambivalence of such readings, which are closely linked to the grafting of genre conventions: while Bracy interprets the dove as Christabel and the snake as Geraldine, Sir Leoline – under the influence of the generic conventions of chivalric romance (Schmitt 2005: 162) – conceives of Geraldine as the damsel in distress (the dove) who is threatened by the men (the snake), and must be rescued in order to allow him reconcile with the House of Lord Roland: “’And said in courtly accents fine, / ‘Sweet maid, Lord Roland’s beauteous dove, / […] Thy sire and I will crush the snake!‘” (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 568 – 571). Both interpretations are questionable. On the one hand, Geraldine, in witchlike fashion, casts a spell on Christabel and is indeed perceived/described as a snake: A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy; And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk to a serpent’s eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, At Christabel she (Geraldine; D.K.) looked askance (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 583 – 586)

However, Geraldine’s snake-like apparition could also be explained by the Electra complex that was referenced above; that is, Geraldine is a figuration of the unconscious and repressed sexual desires which Christabel is unable to accept. Moreover, as has been previously argued, Geraldine’s presence positively affects the other characters, which relativises a reading of her as a deceiving snake. Further, from an intratextual perspective, Sir Leoline’s interpretation of Bracy’s allegory indeed makes sense if we consider how Geraldine is described in the first part as “Drest in a silken robe of white” with a “stately neck” (both attributes which Bracy associates with the dove in his allegory), and that she is “tied on a palfrey white” (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 59, 62, 84) by the men, which can be figuratively related to the snake coiling around the dove. Finally, it is noticeable that Geraldine looks at Christabel with “somewhat of malice, and more of dread, [my emphases; D.K.]” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 585), thus further calling Bracy’s allegorical interpretation into question and rather reversing the opposition²⁶⁸ of perpetrator and victim. Overall, the grafting of various genres entails

 See also Schmitt (2005: 163 – 164) or La Cassagenere (2001: 88).  For the dissolution of the opposition between good (Christabel) and evil (Geraldine), see Ulmer (2007: 386) and Schmitt (2005: 165 – 166).

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a dissemination of the signifier, with the result that Bracy’s allegory becomes utterly ambivalent. In combination with its metafictional impact, it unveils the fleetingness of the (written) signifier and a genre’s inability to fully contain/archive it, i. e. to exert its hermeneutic law on the object. The object hence only materialises in a spectral form, as embodied by the ambivalences and the dissolution of opposition between the characters of Christabel and Geraldine. Not least, the speaker’s rendition of the narrative should also be called into question. The narrator constitutes a problematic mediating instance insofar as he both observes and comments on the action, yet is not able to put the events into a meaningful narrative frame: “the poise [of the narrator; D.K.] is less that of someone perfectly in control than of someone who maintains an air of enigmatic secrecy in the presence of what he, as well as the reader, understands imperfectly” (O’Neill 2001: 75). He therefore resorts to the outlined genres as frames of reference and grafts their hermeneutic structures on the elusive object, i. e. the genre becomes “a place of consignation” (Derrida 1995: 22) through which the object’s heterogeneity is put into a synchrony. In other words, the repeated mediation of the story via various genres constitutes an archival act through which both the narrator and the characters attempt to place Christabel’s heterogeneous and contingent narrative within the archive’s synchrony – “a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” (Derrida 1995: 10). As we have seen, however, the object eludes this ideal configuration. It turns out to be utterly ambiguous and spectral instead, regardless of (or rather because of) its generic frame/archive; be it allegory, romance, Gothic tale, or the narrator’s frequent resort to religious expressions, which, similar to the glosses in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, locate the narrative within a religio‐allegorical²⁶⁹ context. The elusiveness of the narrative is, moreover, self-reflexively addressed by the speaker, hence shifting the focus from the story to its mediation, its archive. The narrator’s discourse is characterised by expressions of speculation (e. g. “as I divine”, “I ween”; Coleridge 2000c: ll. 414, 473) and numerous questions that qualify what has been said or that anticipate it: What makes her [Christabel; D.K] in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 25 – 28)

 See, in this regard, the various religious interpretations of the poem: Ulmer (2007); Nelson (1980); Dramin (1982).

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Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady’s cheek (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 44– 47) And what can ail the mastiff bitch? […] Perhaps it is the owlet’s scritch: For what can ail the mastiff bitch? (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 149 – 153) Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy? (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 207– 209)

Not only do these questions become ambivalent because we cannot always discern for certain whether they are those of Christabel or those of the narrator, but also because they mirror questions which may belong to the reader as they attempt to refigure the current narrative. In so doing, the act of narration can be said to also provide a meta-reflection on it(self), thereby exposing its constructiveness. That is, the act of narration (along with the grafting of genres in order to fix/archive the object) is simultaneously an act of interpretation that modulates/disseminates and thus, in a sense, destroys the very object it wants to preserve. These incomplete and fragmentary genres (or genre elements) within the poem’s microstructure are echoed by the incompleteness of its macrostructure, eventually coming to form the genre of the fragment. Having repeatedly grafted numerous genres onto the narrative without being able to hermeneutically fix it, the poem consequently breaks off. Located within the threshold of fragmentary absence and the prospect of a totality (though unavailable), the genre of the fragment in “Christabel” ultimately exposes the archive’s liminality: On the one hand, it indicates the interminability and destructiveness of the archiving process (i. e. the grafting of various genres as potentially unlimited process of supplementation thereby destroying the very object it strives to preserve; the fever of the archive as manifested in its threshold of construction and destruction). On the other hand, the fragment’s implicit relation to an absent totality coupled with the repeated act of grafting genres (i. e. repeated acts of archiving) disclose the subject’s feverish desire to archive – a desire that is essentially grounded in

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the fragment’s openness for/prospect of future completion (Schmitt 2005: 145 – 146) or, in other words, the archive’s “messianicity”: [T]he question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal […] It is a question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise […] A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (Derrida 1995: 27– 28)

It is precisely this twofold nature of archive fever as manifested in Coleridge’s use of the fragment genre which fundamentally underlies the spectral and uncanny nature of “Christabel”. Christabel’s narrative is not only spectral within the numerous elusive generic frames (the fever of the archive), but she also represents (both in a concrete sense and metonymical sense inasmuch as she represents the poem as a whole) a spectral figure/text that haunts the narrator and readers in their feverish desire to complete her/its narrative archive. In this regard, it is remarkable that in her seminal study, The Romantic Fragment Poem, Marjorie Levinson bases her interpretation of “Christabel” on Coleridge’s assertion (as documented in the letter previously cited and in a version of the poem’s preface) that the poem will consist of five parts. These documents supplement the poem’s archive and hermeneutic scope insofar as she takes them as a starting point for her interpretation (Levinson 1986: 77– 96, in particular 88 – 92) of it as tragedy (because of the five part structure), i. e. as a “’romantic fragment’ […] situated within the implied context of a tragic unity” (Levinson 1986: 95), in which “Leoline is the tragic hero” (Levinson 1986: 87). Similar to the poem’s various characters and the narrator, she also grafts additional generic conventions (the tragedy) onto the object. The intratextual feverish desire to archive the haunting narrative via the grafting of generic frames is thus redoubled on an extrafictional level in the course of the poem’s reception. *** The poem’s critical exploration of genres as archives and archival practices furthermore extends to the (written) signifier and its materiality. In this regard, Sir Leoline’s and Lord Roland’s dissension obtains additional meaning: Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; […] And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.

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And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart’s best brother: They parted – ne’er to meet again! (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 408 – 417)

In the poem’s thematic and structural center lies the theme of miscommunication, as exemplarily embodied by Sir Leoline and Lord Roland, which self-reflexively mirrors the numerous misconstructions through the grafting of generic conventions. There is a certain irony in the fact that Leoline’s and Roland’s failure to communicate is solved through another failure in communication (Sir Roland misinterpreting the signs in bard Bracy’s allegory). However, as has been shown above, it is also possible that Bracy incorrectly interpreted the dream. Together with the numerous self‐reflexive and mirror structures, the theme of miscommunication also suggests the precarious nature of the (written) signifier due to its iterability. This becomes evident not only in the repeated grafting of generic frames – i.e. repeating the narrative through various genres and, in so doing, semantically and structurally disseminating it – but also in the iteration of the very signifiers. To take some examples: (1) The dove as signifier undergoes several oppositional interpretations, being understood as a symbol for Christabel’s innocence (bard Bracy and his counterpart, the narrator), a symbol for Geraldine’s innocence or as a metaphor with Geraldine’s “robe of white” and “stately neck” (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 59, 62) as tertia comparationis; (2) in the poem’s beginning, the narrator cites/ iterates several Gothic topoi (e.g. owls, the howling dog, moonlight and night) and deprives them of their generic semantical value within the act of re-contextualisation, i.e. within the act of citing the very genre; (3) the seemingly stable opposition between Christabel and Geraldine increasingly collapses to the point that the latter becomes a Doppelgänger of both Christabel and her mother. Be it in the constant generic reiteration of the narrative or the outlined dissemination of particular signifiers²⁷⁰ through repetition, meaning is constantly deferred in the poem – a structuring principle that is also alluded to by self-reflexive passages which frame the narrative: the poem begins with a convoluted temporal specification in which the signifier is expressed through another signifier (“’Tis a month before the month of May”; Coleridge 2000c: l. 21), and by the ending of the second part, it is telling that Sir Leoline’s resolution of his miscommunication with Lord Roland is equally deferred in an indirect fashion:

 See also Schmitt (2005: 164– 165).

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’Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet, Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet, More loud than your horses’ echoing feet! And loud and loud to Lord Roland call, Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall! Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free— Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me! He bids thee come without delay With all thy numerous array And take thy lovely daughter home: (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 498 – 507)

Not only does he command bard Bracy to tell Lord Roland through him (“Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me [Bracy; D.K.]!”) and his rescued daughter (who won’t actually be present) that he repents his “words of fierce disdain” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 513), but this very speech act is again deferred to the ending of the second part due to Bracy’s hesitation (“’Why, Bracy! Dost thou loiter here? / I bade the hence!’”; Coleridge 2000c: 651– 652). Finally, it is (in combination with their insinuated yet not executed reunion) deferred in a broader sense because of the very materiality of the poem, i. e. its fragmentary ending, which further provides cause to query the success of the speech act. At the same time, the poem is marked by various instances of supplementation that aim at exerting hermeneutic control over the elusive narrative (and signifiers). This becomes especially evident in the poem’s paratext, in particular in the preface with its explanation of the correct use of its metre (which will be later addressed) and by the text’s segmentation into individual parts. Each part of the narrative (“Part 1”; “Part 2”; Coleridge 2000c: 442, 449) is followed by a respective conclusion. With their headings (“The Conclusion to Part 1”; “The Conclusion to Part 2”; Coleridge 2000c: 448, 456), the narrator signals his hermeneutic authority (also not that it is “The Conclusion [my emphasis; D.K.]”) over the preceding text and legitimises his following summary and further interpretation. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of exergue, we can say that this is an act of archival inscription insofar as the external printing “give[s] the key through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form which ought to set the stage […] serves to stock in anticipation and to prearchive a lexicon which, from there on, ought to lay down the law and give the order” (Derrida 1995: 12). This feverish desire to archive is, however, undercut by the archive’s destructive tendencies (i. e. the “archive’s fever”): (1) Contrary to the hermeneutic authority indicated via the paratext/exergue, the narrator reveals his insecurity in his “The Conclusion to Part 1”, as, for instance, conveyed in the use of downtoners (“Perchance”; Coleridge 2000c: l. 324) or by his questions (which already

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abounded in the first part, previously analysed). (2) Opposed to the hermeneutic control the narrator wishes to exert, the narrative turns out to be – as has been shown – utterly ambivalent²⁷¹ the more he tries to inscribe it into a meaningful, all‐encompassing (generic) frame of reference. Within his summary of the first part, the narrator self-reflexively addresses a further aspect of such distorting frames: Her [Christabel’s; D.K.] slender palms together prest, Heaving sometimes on her breast; Her face resigned to bliss or bale Her face, oh call it fair not pale, And both blue eyes more bright than clear, Each about to have a tear. (Coleridge 2000c: ll. 286 – 291)

The line “Her face, oh call it fair not pale” is remarkable. His objection to “call it fair not pale” signals the distorting effects caused by the grafting of generic conventions onto the object (evidenced here by a regular pattern of rhyming pairs, which are reminiscent of the ballad form) since the suggested/implied choice of words is rather owing to the archiving frame (“fair” does not rhyme with “bale”, but “pale” does) and less to the object’s properties. With this ingeniously formulated rectification, nevertheless, Coleridge still manages to communicate his intention (i. e. her face is “fair” and not “pale”) and to comply with the established rhyme scheme of the passage (aabbcc), whose pattern of rhyming pairs is also continued in the subsequent stanza (aabbaaccdd); not least, he also complies with the poem’s established metre of four accents. Similar to the first part, thus, the speaker’s struggle against the distorting effects of homogenising (generic) frames/archives is put into the thematic focus. In so doing, Coleridge metapoetically explores the consequences of his thoughts on “the nature of poetry” in his Biographia Literaria: If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. […] But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. (Coleridge 1973: ch. XIV)

 See also Schmitt (2005: 164).

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Accordingly, metre and rhyme (“accent and sound”) are not only “superadded”, but the content must be harmonised with it so that all parts form an organic whole. As a consequence, the very materiality of metre/rhyme as archiving device modulates and distorts the object. Put differently, the (archiving) signifier turns out to be considerably determined by the materiality of its suprasegmental structure (functioning as superordinate archiving frame). Together with the conclusion’s linear‐teleological structure (i. e. he recounts the events, tries to retrospectively put them into a meaningful linear order that leads over to the second part), the hesitations and questions outlined eventually suggest a parallelism with the first part. This structural congruency is, in turn, redoubled in “The Conclusion to Part 2” whose indirect, almost metaphysical account corresponds to the dominating allegorical mode of the second part inasmuch as it constitutes “the continuity of a theme […] Christabel’s infancy and childhood” (Farrison 1961: 89). The point is that these parallelisms (in conjunction with the other numerous mirror structures which internally fragment the text; Schmitt 2005: 164) indicate a conflation of object level and meta level, whose separateness is paratextually suggested (the object level of “Part 1” and “Part 2” vs. the meta level of both conclusions), but ultimately dissolved during the act of archivisation: “the poet’s reflexive relation to his poem […] is circumspect, wary, unforthcoming, denying the very structure of significance it appears intent on uncovering. […] the poem itself […] cannot […] decode its own secrets” (O’Neill 2001: 75). Finally, the signifier’s condition as a precarious archiving device is additionally explored through the materiality of the poem’s metre. This meta-level is indicated both explicitly in the supplementing preface, in which Coleridge explains the poem’s metrical structure of four accents, and implicitly within the text itself. The latter becomes apparent, besides the analysed self‐reflexive passage (“oh call it fair not pale”; Coleridge 2000c: l. 289), in the copious allusions to sound and metre (Russett 2003: 788 – 789): from the cacophony of sounds in the first part (the howling dog, the crowing rooster or the hooting owls, indicating the dominant structure of four accents “Tu – whit! – Tu – whoo!” [Coleridge 2000c: l. 3]), Christabel’s very name (Christabell) to the uncanny presence of the “warning knell” (Coleridge 2000c: l. 342)²⁷² throughout the second part, the poem constantly reminds the reader of its musicality and rhythm. This self-reflexive preoccupation with prosodic and metrical features is not surprising in view of the extraordinary development of the medium of print at the time:

 The dashes can be read as implied offbeats (McKim 1993: 77; O’Donnell 2001: 522).

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Writing and print distance the utterer of discourse from the hearer, and both from the word, which appears in writing and print as an object or thing. The result was that, when the effects of writing and print matured, when typography was interiorized in the Western psyche definitively at the moment in Western history known as the Romantic Movement, the question, Who is saying what to whom? raised exceedingly complex issues. (Ong 2012: 283)

The Romantics feared that the proliferation of writing respectively printed mass publications entailed a widening gap between the poet and their audience. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth voices his misgivings that the culture of (mass) print (“the rapid communication of intelligence”) is responsible for a decrease in the readers’ aesthetic sensibility (O’Donnell 2001: 512 – 515): the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. (Wordsworth 2006a: 1499 – 1500)

Poetry being a fundamentally performative genre, this “savage torpor” also involved a decreasing sensibility for poetry’s prosodic superstructure. Since “ [p] rint had effectively reduced sound to surface, hearing to vision” (Ong 2012: 297), the Romantics were concerned that the illocutionary qualities of a given poem (such as phrasing, intonation, pace, timbre, volume etc.) could not be transmitted adequately through the medium of typography (O’Donnell 2001: 512– 517). Through its explicit focus on sound, hence, “Christabel” is a poem that meta‐poetically addresses the issues of archiving sound via the medium of print. The preface constitutes a supplementing document for the very poem as archive (of sound) inasmuch as Coleridge provides the reader a manual for the correct actualization of its metre. In so doing, Coleridge reveals not only the aforementioned archival anxiety (can writing/print archive the poem’s per-

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formative/prosodic aspects?) but also a further aspect of his feverish desire to control the object. His explication of the poem’s metre in the preface to Christabel, though, is not without problems: The metre of Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular though it may seem so from being founded on a new principle: namely that of counting in each line the accents not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. (Coleridge 2000c: 441– 442)

Critics have pointed to the impossibility to properly scan the poem due to its irregularities in length and stress (O’Donnell 2001: 522; Russett 2003: 784; McKim 1993: 74). This is primarily due to a prescriptive 18th century conception of metrical regularity. “Accent”, however, should not here (only) be regarded as syllabic stress but as the beat of the underlying rhythm. That is, the poem features a regular rhythm of four beats (including silent, implied beats), which is individually realised within the performance so that syllabic stresses (may) become ambivalent. In other words, Coleridge’s conception of metre in “Christabel” relies on isochrony, i. e. on a regular pattern of stress based on temporal units and not on syllabic division.²⁷³ That kind of metre, in fact, was commonly used in traditional ballads but has been largely neglected over the last two-hundred years (O’Donnell 2001: 535; McKim 1993: 77). Coleridge’s “new principle”, therefore, is an attempt at recovering and preserving the genre’s very origins, further disclosing the poem’s relation to the notion of the (fever to) archive. The metrical ambivalences (or potentialities in the course of their performance) within a nonetheless fixed structure not only play with reader expectations (similar to the playful manipulation of generic conventions) but they ultimately mirror the precarious materiality of the signifier that has been outlined: to the same extent that it is almost impossible to fix/archive the poem’s metre via the written signifier, i. e. to control dissemination, it is impossible to hermeneutically fix Christabel’s elusive narrative (O’Donnell 2001: 521, 527– 528; 533 – 535). The previously analysed grafting of generic conventions and its distorting effects are echoed in the subtly imposed yet decidedly elusive metrical structure through the very materiality of print: “the medium of print exerts additional pressure to realize ore even ‘hallucinate,’ a virtual pattern made both elusive and exigent by the frequency of its exceptions” (Russett 2003: 787). Genre(s),  See McKim (1993: 74– 79) and Attridge (2013: 37– 39) for the outlined peculiarities of Coleridge’s conception of metre in “Christabel” and a further detailed discussion of it.

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metre and writing, being mutual archival practices and mutually archived objects at the same time, hence foreground the spectral nature of the archive and, in so doing, they essentially add to the uncertain, uncanny atmosphere of “Christabel”. Fundamentally informed by the disseminating iterability of its metre, which self-reflexively mirrors (and is mirrored by) the iterability of the signifier and that of the genre, “Christabel” is in itself utterly fragmentary as it is located within the threshold of an implied but ultimately absent totality. The genre of the fragment, therefore, is both an aesthetic manifestation of this rupture (the archive’s fever) and an expression of the feverish desire for a potential totality. And it is precisely within this neuralgic threshold – the fragmentary space of presence and absence, of a genre’s, a signifier’s, a metre’s constitution and destruction, of its inherent sense of incompleteness and messianic prospect of fulfilment – where “Christabel” constitutes itself as highly precarious, spectral poetic archive.

3 Writing, Print and the Archive: William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley An inventor of the “infernal method” (Blake 1988a: 39) of printing, William Blake is a poet not only concerned with language as an (abstract) medium of representation, but particularly with the materiality and physicality of the printing process, i. e. the inscription into an archival substrate. Beyond introducing the reader to the dialectically related worlds of innocence and experience through the various poems in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake’s “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence (1789) also features a meta‐discourse on the archiving medium of poetry, i. e. writing, print and their respective materiality. As I shall argue in the following section, Blake conceives language/writing as deficient archiving media and, at the same time, displays a desire for originality and wholeness, allegorically framing these ideas within religious references. This movement of the archive’s fever (i. e. writing’s precarious materiality) and the fever to archive underlies the poem’s tension (also in its dialectical relation to the “Introduction” to the Songs of Experience) and reflects the period’s (melancholic) archival anxieties in view of the proliferation of paper products – an archival anxiety that also

Note: Parts of this chapter (ch. V.3; William Blake) were published by De Gruyter in 2020: Kerler, David. “Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats”. Anglia 138:3 (2020): 355 – 383.

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surfaces with a fear of a loss of poetic orality, which Wordsworth and Coleridge were also concerned about (as has been exemplarily shown in “Christabel”). In the “Introduction” (Songs of Innocence), a piper is piping his songs in the valley until he meets a child on a cloud. The child repeatedly urges him to re-enact the song via different archival media. Over the course of the song’s re-enactment, the poem describes a movement from spontaneity to fixedness, coinciding with a transition from affective music (“Piping songs of pleasant glee”; Blake 1988b: l. 2), to representational music (“Pipe a song about a Lamb”; Blake 1988b: l. 5), to orality (singing in stanza 3) and eventually to writing (“write / In a book”; Blake 1988b: ll. 13 – 14) (Makdisi 2015: 10 – 12; Marsh 2001: 11). This process is densely connoted with a loss of innocence:²⁷⁴ Precisely at the point when the piper begins to inscribe the song into a book, the child – an image for innocence – “vanish’d from [his; D.K.] sight” (Blake 1988b: l. 15). Furthermore, the pen the piper manufactures for this purpose “stain’d the water clear” (Blake 1988b: l. 18), suggesting a negatively connoted contrast between the unstained, innocent and non-domesticated “valleys wild” that existed before the act of writing (Marsh 2001: 13; Cooper 2017: 19; Makdisi 2015: 13). This loss of innocence over the course of the archival act is moreover suggested by intermedial references. We should not forget that Blake incorporated his poems into paintings, thereby constituting a semantic unity. In this case, the title page, frontispiece and the design of the actual poem reflect the described process. The frontispiece is of particular relevance as it features an intermedial reference to Agosto Veneziano’s engraving of Abraham and Isaac (based on a work by Raphael):²⁷⁵ The piper’s posture (especially the legs’ position and his upward looking head) strongly suggests a parallel to Veneziano’s depiction of Abraham, who is about to sacrifice his loved son Isaac because of God’s demand and is interrupted by an angel (sent by God) who tries to take his knife away. In Blake’s adaptation, however, the knife is replaced by a pipe. In consideration of the described development within the poem, the reference further indicates how the use of an archiving medium together with the related archival act is a sacrifice of innocence.²⁷⁶ In contrast to Abraham of the Old Testament, who was only tested by God and, in the end, not required to complete the sacrifice, it is the child/angel who, in fact, urges the piper to carry out the sacrifice, which he eventually ful See also Paulsen (1987: 131): “the piper becomes a poet and hence falls from innocence into the production of his art.”  For the poem’s intermedial relation to Agostino Veneziano’s engraving, see Guest and Barrelll (1988: 242– 246).  See Guest and Barrell (1988: 243 – 246, 249 – 252) for this intermedial reading.

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fils. In this regard, it is no coincidence that the piper takes a “hollow reed” (Blake 1988b: l. 16) for crafting his pen since a reed also constitutes the basic material for creating a pipe (Makdisi 2015: 13; Guest and Barrell 1988: 250): the fact that both media (pipe and pen) are made from the same material establishes an evolutionary connection between them, further emphasising how the process of archival reproduction (initiated with the pipe) entails an increasing loss of innocence/originality/purity, i. e. a “sacrificing/killing” or at least “staining” of the archived object, ultimately culminating with the media of print and writing. This ambivalence related to the archival act is also suggested by the poem’s illustration in that the framing vines bear resemblance to the shape of a pen²⁷⁷ (and also metonymically refer to paper) and by the volume’s front page, in which the vines resemble serpents threatening the children’s innocence (emphasised by the Edenic apples that hang over them).²⁷⁸ The (self‐)destructive dimension of the archiving process becomes apparent when taking a closer look at the poem’s use of its (written) signifiers. The piper’s song is embedded within a multi-layered structure of repetition, entailing a temporalisation and spatialisation of its signifiers, by which meaning is ultimately disseminated. In so doing, through its materiality/its texture the poem performs what it allegorically depicts. While, at first glance, the poem’s regular outer structure (five quatrains, each line consisting of seven syllables; various parallelisms) and musicality (regular trochaic tetrameter; various alliterations) suggest identity between the piper’s music and its mediation/repetition within the poem, numerous (semantic) ambivalences arise. The poem begins regularly with an alternate rhyme in the first stanza but in the following stanzas the first and third lines (except those in the fourth stanza) do not rhyme: there is no connection between “Pipe a song about Lamb” and “Piper pipe that song again” (second stanza), between “Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe” and “So I sung the same again” (third stanza), and between “And I made a rural pen” and “And I wrote my happy songs” (fifth stanza), indicating a rupture throughout the course of the songs repetition (i. e. its musicality cannot be fully translated within writing). Instances of identity, however, can be found in the end rhymes of lines 7 and 11 (“[…] pipe that song again” and “So I sung the same again”) together with lexical repetitions and alliterations (especially linguistic variations and repetitions of the word “pipe”). Against this backdrop, it appears that the poem favours orality

 See Makdisi (2015: 13) for the vines representing a pen.  See Summerfield (1998: 342) for the reference to serpents and Edenic apples in the poem’s design.

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over writing since the transition from music to singing is indeed linked via rhymes while the transition from singing (line 11) to writing (stanza four) is not. Additionally, though indeed displaying a regular alternate rhyme which suggests identity with the first stanza (i. e. the original act of piping), it is precisely the fourth stanza where the act of writing is connoted with a loss of innocence (“Piper sit thee down and write” and “So he [the child on a cloud; D.K.] vanish’d from my sight”). This apparent phonocentrism (also note the “I” in the Tautotes of “pIper [my emphasis; D.K.]” and its linguistic variations) discloses (an archival desire for) a supposed identity between sound/voice and being – a notion that Derrida considers as a form of logocentrism: It remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning. Hegel demonstrates very well the strange privilege of sound in idealization, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject. (Derrida 2016: 12)

The present written poem, as a substitute or crutch for that (idealised) orality, becomes increasingly ambiguous in the course of its performance. What begins with subtle ambivalence such as with the word “wild” in the first line (does it refer as an adjective to the valleys or as an adverb to the act of piping?), extends over to the capital letter in “Lamb” (line 5; hinting at the religious subtext; Agnus Dei) and the homophony between “hollow reed” and “read” in lines 16 and 14 (to which the rhyme scheme also alludes). The materiality of the last two examples, ironically, can function here as a supplement/crutch for a deficient orality in that it eliminates through the written form potential misunderstandings (such as a confusion of “reed” and “read”, i. e. their homophonic ambiguity is erased by not being homograph). Yet, when considering the poem’s intermedial embedding (the theme of sacrifice) and the imagery of the final stanza (staining the clear water with the pen), the homophonic ambiguity indeed makes sense inasmuch as the result of such a deficient archival act can only result in a “hollow read[ing]”,²⁷⁹ in a failure of the deferred communicative act. Furthermore, as has been shown above, the poem heavily relies on its intertextual/intermedial embedding, functioning as a supplement in order to control its meaning. Meaning, thus, is constructed through an intertextual web of references and, through this, ultimately deferred (the present poem -> its supplementing paratext, i.e. the three designs -> the intermedial allusion to Agostino Veneziano -> the  See also Guest and Barrelll (1988: 250); McLane (2001: 429); and Cooper (2017: 18 – 19) for the pun on “hollow read”.

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biblical references conveyed in the design’s iconography). Ironically, the more the text is supplemented by these visual paratexts, the more ambiguous it becomes. As Guest and Barrell problematise in their reading of the reference to Veneziano, [t]he reference […] reproduces the difficulties we have already detected, for we might […] see the pipe as the means of purchasing the redemption of innocence or as the weapon of its slaughter, of the sacrifice of innocence by the experienced adult it trusts to protect it. Does the exchange of the pipe for knife establish an innocence in the piper and indicate that he will pipe songs to children instead of sacrificing them? Or does it suggest that the sacrifice of their innocence will be accomplished as surely whether we pipe songs to them or cut their throats? (Guest and Barrell 1988: 45 – 46)

Observed from a superordinate position, however, the very fact that the intermedial reference is utterly ambivalent regarding its semantic impact on the poem testifies that the act of writing (including the symbolism, i. e. the signifiers, of the designs) indeed is a sacrifice of innocence (i. e. of semantic originality/presence within the unity of signifier and signified). So, the question whether the communicative act over the course of the song’s archiving via writing and print is successful must be evaluated in a rather negative sense. The audience (as personified by the child on a cloud) has vanished and the poem eventually ends with the ambiguous lines, “And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear” (Blake 1988b: ll. 19 – 20). Not only does the modal verb “may” produce further ambivalence (is “may” used here in the sense of ‘granting permission’ or ‘possibility’, or even as intentional ambivalence?) that questions whether the song will be refigured successfully by its future audience, but it also levels the previously constructed opposition between orality and writing, ultimately exposing the logocentrism of its displayed phonocentrism; the written songs should be heard and not read, thereby relating orality to the notion of reading/writing in the fourth stanza, where the piper writes the song in “a book that all may read” (Blake 1988b: l. 14). In other words, the last line exposes how neither orality nor writing are secondary to each other but rather operate on the same level. Meaning, as foregrounded through the poem’s meta‐level, is generated via repetition and, through the processes of the sign’s de- and recontextualisation (and, not least, because of its iteration through various archival media), disseminated at the same time. This loss of language’s innocence, its “fall” into experience because of the iterability of the sign, is consequently the predominant mode of the related poem, the “Introduction” to the Songs of Experience. Here, the bard “Who Present, Past, & Future sees / Whose ears have heard, / The Holy Word / That walk’d among the ancient trees” (Blake 1988c: ll. 2– 5) is categorically contrasted with the piper (Marsh

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2001: 20), who is only “aware of the present moment’s sensation” (Marsh 2001: 20). The bard’s awareness of temporality (past, present and future) is closely tied to the holy word he heard (which is, again, only present as a deferred signifier in that it metonymically refers to God and the expulsion from paradise²⁸⁰), constituting an allegorical depiction of the signifier’s loss of innocence, i.e. its fall into temporality and dissemination. As Robert N. Essick shows, it is in the Songs of Experience where the “semiotic consciousness […] is self-consciously aware of the differential nature of language” (1998: 128). The unfolding poem, hence, is located within a world of linguistic/communicative ambivalence and lack, continuing the process initiated in the “Introduction” to Innocence. These ambivalences involve: (1) spatio‐temporal ambivalences, such as the oxymoronic “starry floor” (Blake 1988c: l. 18), the poem’s liminality between night and the approaching dawn, or images like “the slumberous mass” (Blake 1988c: l. 15), suggesting a condition of indeterminability; (2) ambiguities in syntax and punctuation²⁸¹ so as to make it unclear whether it is the bard or the holy word who is “Calling the lapsed Soul” (Blake 1988c: l. 6). The bard’s (?) address to an allegorical personification of earth, which is continued in the poem “Earth’s Answer”, eventually (3) results in a failure of the communicative act inasmuch as they talk past each other: whereas the bard is urging earth to free herself since her confinement is solely made up of mind‐forged manacles,²⁸² earth responds that she cannot do so precisely because of her condition of fear (i.e. her limited point of view that is routed in a state of experience).²⁸³ Blake’s depiction of the deficient archival act, including its various archival media, concomitantly reveals a feverish desire to archive. That is, the described loss of innocence during – or rather, precisely because of – the archival act discloses a strong desire for the origin(al object, represented here by the song), manifesting itself in idealised (religious) notions of a lost origin. As Essick observes, “the linguistic landscape of innocence […] [is] one that unself-unconsciously perceives (and hence creates) incarnational signs as the embodiment and expression of the spirit immanent within the material” (1998: 128). In other words, while the world of Experience stresses the sign’s differential nature, the world of Innocence relies

 See Ackland (1980: 4) for a close analysis of the reference to Genesis III. 8 – 9.  See, for example, Ackland (1980: 3 – 6); Summerfield (1998: 411); or Cooper (2017: 24– 25).  See Frye (1987: 36): “The ‘Selfish father of men’ who keeps Earth imprisoned is not God the Father […] but the false father that man visualizes as soon as he takes his mind off the Incarnation. […] The source of this scarecrow is fallen nature: man makes a gigantic idol out of the dark world, and is so impressed by its stupidity, cruelty, empty spaces, and automatism that he tries to live in accordance with the dreary ideals it suggests.”  See Marsh’s (2001: 23 – 30) reading of the poem, in which he discloses their argumentative “deadlock end” (2001: 28).

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on the unity between signifier and signified, on the fiction of a transcendental signified. This idealisation is, however, only an archival fiction; the written poem – which is already a product of archival mediation (writing, print) – discloses within its own semantic breakdown (the fever of the archive as manifested in the disseminating structure of repetition) rather a “nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Derrida 1995: 57). The latter surfaces most notably in the poem’s religious subtext (including its supplementing visual paratexts) that allegorically frames the archival process within the lapse from innocence to experience. Accordingly, the very act of archiving through writing and print is melancholically conceived as an expulsion from an original unity, a loss of originality and presence, into the differential world of lack and absence (the world of experience). This is moreover suggested by the poem’s use of its signifiers. As Essick points out, the recurrence of pleonastic adjective/noun combinations with a common root in the “Introduction” to Innocence (such as “pleasant glee”, “merry chear”, “happy chear”) “indicate an early stage of linguistic development” (1998: 111) echoing 18th century language theory. According to the latter, such combinations constitute secondary forms (adjectives) which derive from primary words (nouns and verbs, which evolved from natural signs) (Essick 1998: 111). Against this backdrop, the poem “Infant Joy” (Innocence) functions as a supplementing vignette to the described process of linguistic evolution in the “Introduction”:²⁸⁴ I have no name I am but two days old.— What shall I call thee? I happy am Joy is my name,— Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee; Thou dost smile. I sing the while Sweet joy befall thee. (Blake 1988d)

 See also Hilton (2003: 198): “The collection [Songs of Innocence and Experience; D.K.] may be imagined as a series of vignettes concerning the psyche’s birth into language and protracted journey toward fuller awareness of the world of signs and sense exemplified and conveyed primarily by language.”

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As long as the child has no name it still belongs to the pre-linguistic realm identified with the notion of innocence (Hilton 2003: 199). The act of naming, however, encompasses a birth into language (note – similar to the crying, laughing and weeping of the “Introduction” – the transition from natural signs to words, i. e. from a preverbal “smile” to “joy” as name), re‐enacting the fall from innocence into linguistic representation and giving way to a state of experience (Essick 1998: 110 – 111; Guest and Barrell 1988: 255 – 256). In conclusion, the poem’s texture (together with its supplementing poems and designs), exposes the opposition between an idealised (logocentric) conception of language (innocence) and its inherently differential nature (experience) – an opposition that has been grasped as a feverish, melancholic desire to archive in view of the archiving media’s precarious materiality. In addition to this, the poem’s texture also reveals the inherently paradoxical yet dialectical relation between those different concepts of language; that is, the idealisation of the linguistic sign presupposes its iterability, which is, however, necessarily contaminated by processes of de- and recontextualisation, by its spatialisation and temporalisation. As a result, the iterative structure of writing, which contains the threat of miscommunication, makes communication possible in the first place; ²⁸⁵ innocence and experience thus being mutually dependent. The outlined anxieties and desires projected into the medium of language/ writing ultimately echo larger concerns of the period, namely its increasingly growing print culture, the mass production of paper products and the fragility of the very medium. Poetry (a genre that heavily relies on sound/orality and performance) could be, on the one hand, circulated widely through the archival medium of print, but it nonetheless ran the risk of losing its defining aspects in the course of the archival process. This anxiety fundamentally underlies the analysed evolution of the piper’s song in the “Introduction”, in which the transition from sound/orality to writing is conceived of as loss. In fact, many of the British Romantics saw “the fate of poetry as a cultural project set adrift from its imagined origins in speech and gesture” (McLane 2001: 423) and strived to retrieve these lost origin(al)s (McLane 2001: 423). One of the archival concerns in Coleridge’s “Christabel” is, as has been shown, precisely the question of how to preserve a poem’s prosodic and performative peculiarities within the medium of writing/print. Against this backdrop it is no coincidence that, akin to the outlined “sonnet craze”, a “ballad craze” dominated the literary production since it “emerged as the genre most implicated in the romantic exploration

 For the iterability of the sign, see Derrida (2001a: 25 – 29, 32, 34– 35, 40); Derrida (2001b: 184). See also Kerler (2013: 68 – 70).

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of primitivity, modernity, and historicity” (McLane 2001: 424), paralleled by collections (archives) of old ballads (such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1756) documenting an “apparently obsolete orality” (McLane 2001: 424) and acquiring the status of “relics” or antiquities themselves (McLane 2001: 424– 425). Blake’s “Introduction”, which features various elements of the ballad genre such as the cross-rhyming quatrains and its musicality,²⁸⁶ tackles in its final lines precisely the aforementioned archival concerns, namely whether the poem’s musicality and performativity can/will be reconfigured by its future audience once its immediacy is lost during the process of archiving through writing: “And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear” (Blake 1988b: ll. 19 – 20), the emphasis on “hearing” instead of “reading” thereby alluding to the media transition from orality/performance to writing/ print and the issue of “hearing” a text. It is this question of futurity that Derrida calls a “spectral messianicity that is at work in the concept of the archive and [that; D.K.] ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise” (Derrida 1995: 27– 28) – an experience that surfaces in the subject’s feverish desire to archive given the medium’s spectrality. Finally, Blake’s special printing method also constitutes a counter-discourse to the period’s technological and media developments. Contrary to the age’s inclination towards disposable mass production, anthologies and portable books, Blake’s illuminated books could not be easily replicated and were much more expensive and time-consuming to produce (Goode 2012: 9; Cooper 2017: 47). They were literally re-produced and not replicated/copied since his “infernal method” involved the uniqueness of each print, throughout the course of which the artist also physically experiences the immediacy of the act of inscription, of melting the infinite vision with the finite material, of putting the heterogeneity of text and design into the archive’s synchrony (Goode 2012: 10 – 11, 20, 25; Cooper 2017: 83 – 84). The very materiality of these poems, thus, exposes a further aspect of Blake’s feverish desire to archive, i. e. a yearning to preserve the singularity of his work of art in light of a growing culture of disposable mass printing. Today with the Internet, we have a potentially unlimited archive, which can preserve Blake’s designs and make them accessible to a worldwide audience for free (see the William Blake Archive on http:/www.blakearchive.org). But even this archival medium is insufficient to a certain extent inasmuch it is not able to capture the uniqueness of Blake’s designs (which his production

 See McLane (2001: 427) for elements of the ballad genre in Blake’s “Introduction” to Innocence.

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method brought about by not relying on copying but on re-producing) and, not least, the unique look and feel of their materiality. *** While William Blake’s “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence can be read as an allegory for the period’s archival anxieties in the light of its rapidly emerging culture of print, Percy Bysshe Shelley explores in “Mont Blanc” questions of epistemology and ontology through the discourse of the archive (fever). Conceiving writing/print as paradoxical archive and archival practice by juxtaposing idealistic and materialistic conceptions, the poem constitutes a testimony of Shelley’s philosophical thought, which is to be understood less as a development from materialist‐empiricist ideas to (Neo‐)Platonic thought, as has been posited by many critics, but rather as relational, linking idealist epistemology with materialist ontology.²⁸⁷ A pivotal text in Shelley’s oeuvre, “Mont Blanc” (1817) has been scrutinised by innumerable scholars and from several different perspectives, altogether constituting an impressive supplementing archive of the poem. These studies primarily revolve around the poem’s final lines: And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (Shelley 2000a: ll. 142– 144)

Encapsulating the poem’s conundrum on the threshold of epistemology and ontology, the key question arises whether the sublime Mont Blanc exists (a) independently outside language, or (b) whether it exists within (imaginative) language/perception, or (c) as relational and interdependent between those two positions (a+b).²⁸⁸ Shelley approaches the issue with a highly self-reflexive depiction of the eponymous Mont Blanc, levelling the opposition between inside and outside, between object-level and meta-level: I The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

 See Bode (2008: 145 – 172) for a detailed outline of Shelley’s philosophical thought and a revision of its critical reception.  See, exemplarily, Benziger (1962: 99); Kapstein (1947: 1049 – 1050; 1058 – 1059); Hitt (2005: 140, 142– 143, 155); Hall (1973: 165 – 169); Abroon (2001); Bode (2008: 172– 179).

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Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume, In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (Shelley 2000a: ll. 1– 11)

As many critics have observed, Mont Blanc constitutes both an object and a metaphor for its apprehension by the speaker, i. e. a metaphor for the human mind.²⁸⁹ I want to shift the focus in this metaphorical relation from tenor (the human mind) and vehicle (Mont Blanc) to their ground, their tertium comparationis: it is striking that Shelley links the act of perception to images related to a strong physicality, motion and the notion of impression²⁹⁰, i. e. of inscribing something into a material substrate, which constitutes a fundamental aspect of the archive. Already from the beginning it is suggested (strongly influenced by Shelley’s reading of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) that external “things” leave a mark on the mind (“the universe of things / Flows through the mind”)²⁹¹ – an act of archival inscription that is paralleled metaphorically in the succeeding image of the “vast river [which; D.K] / Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.” A further look reveals that, similar to John Locke’s metaphor of the tabula rasa, this epistemological conception is grounded within the epoch’s dominating archival discourse, namely that of paper and writing. In each stanza (except the third and final one, where he focuses on the sublime summit in particular; an issue that will be discussed later) the abovementioned metaphorical acts of inscription are located within various metonymical references to paper (e. g. “wild woods”, “pines”, “brood of pines”,

 See, for example, Bloom (1961: 293 – 294); Benziger (1962: 74); Hall (1973: 201); or Kapstein (1947: 1046 – 1047).  See, for example, Hall (1973: 207): “Shelley transforms his physical view of the River and the Ravine (vehicle) into an image of the flow of sense impressions through the human mind (tenor)” or Kapstein (1947: 1047): “Read in accordance with Locke’s theory of knowledge, the passage [ll. 1– 11; D.K.] means that a ‘vast river’ of sensory impressions of material objects flows into the mind where it unites with the mind’s own ‘feeble brook’ of ideas to make up the total content of mind.”  See, among many others, Kapstein (1947: 1047– 1048, 1052); Tetreault (1987: 72– 76); Hall (1973: 207).

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“forests”, “future leaf”, “vast pines”; Shelley 2000a: ll. 8, 14, 20, 84, 90, 109). This becomes exemplarily evident in the fourth stanza, where a “flood of ruin / […] Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing / Its destined path” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 107– 110), or in the second stanza’s “mighty swinging” of the “giant brood of pines” that make one hear “an old and solemn harmony” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 20, 23, 24). As such, the act of perception is conceived as an act of material inscription, whose further associations with paper (print) echo the social and media evolutions of the “age of paper” (Stauffer 2006: para. 8). Against this backdrop, the strong sense of motion expressed in the poem’s principal metaphor (water running down the mountain figuring the impressions on the mind) might also be reminiscent of the motion of the cylinder or rotary press. It seems to be no coincidence that the latter were patented by William Nicholson in 1790 (McKitterick 1998: 244; Greetham 1994: 145) who was a close friend of William Godwin, and whose British Encyclopedia (1809) Shelley keenly read and used for his poetry (Mitchell 2001).²⁹² Nicholson’s ideas were eventually realised as steam powered cylinder press by the German Friedrich König in 1811, who lived in London at the time and whose machine was used for the publication of the London Times on the 29th November 1814 (https://www.edwardlloyd.org/ printing_history.php; Banham 2009: 276 – 277; Watson and Hill 2015: 71; Twyman 1998: 69 – 72) – a historic event that was celebrated by John Walter II as “the greatest improvement connected with printing, since the discovery of the art itself” (The London Times 29th November 1814: p. 3). Within the poem, accordingly, the sense of motion is expressed with characteristic verbs such as to roll (“rolls its rapid waves”, “rolls its perpetual stream”; Shelley 2000a: ll. 2, 109) and adjectives such as in “ceaseless motion” (Shelley 2000a: l. 32), suggesting the ceaseless rolling of the printing press. This association is reinforced by an extensive use of run‐on lines that formally mimic such movement (e. g. in lines 105 – 126), and which, tellingly, conclude with the water transforming into “swift vapours to the circling air” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 125 – 126), hinting at the steam-powered machine. All things considered – i. e. the metaphoric association of perception with water running down the Mont Blanc, its metonymic situatedness within paper, the various allusions to the printing press’s perpetual movement, and the close proximity of these biographical and media‐historical contexts –indicate that Shelley’s epistemological conceptions are closely related to contemporary

 See also, in a more general context, D. G. King-Hele’s article on “Shelley and Science” (1992), in which he points out that “from his [P. B. Shelley’s; D.K] schooldays onwards he was fascinated by science, and his poetry is much enriched by the infusion of scientific imagery” (253).

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archival discourses and technological (archival) innovations, namely (steampowered) print and writing. The impressions are eventually synthesised by the human mind and, not least, through the active power²⁹³ of imagination. Characteristically, the mind is conveyed through spatial metaphors (i. e. caverns/caves), implying the idea of a physical repository, an archive for its impressions: “the everlasting universe of things / [that; D.K] Flows through the mind” at the beginning of the poem is related in the second stanza to the “caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion”, and is finally made concrete with Shelley’s self-reflection on his own “human mind, which passively / Now renders and receives fast influencings, / Holding an unremitting interchange / […] In the still cave of witch Poesy” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 1– 2, 30, 37– 38, 44). What Shelley alludes to by use of the word rendering and the emphasis on the “unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 39 – 40) is the active power of imagination, i. e. his “own separate phantasy” (Shelley 2000a: l. 36), which is eventually put to the extreme in the constructivist final lines of the poem (“And what were thou”….). In so doing, Shelley follows David Hume, according to whom those external impressions are synthesised into ideas and then into more complex ideas (via the uniting principles of “RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT” [Hume 1962: 319], resembling the archive’s exertion of archontic power and that of consignation²⁹⁴). At the same time, however, he exceeds Hume’s empiricism by stressing imagination’s radical creative, constructive capacity (as figured prominently by Shelley’s “phantasy” of the mountain’s sublime peak in view of the poem’s final lines).²⁹⁵ The ostensible conflict between transcendental idealism and material empiricism (Benziger 1962: 74), between the insight that consciousness is dialectically related to language and that linguistic signs only refer to ideas / contents of consciousness vs. the conception of an external world outside language with its own structures and relations (Bode 2008: 166 – 167), is resolved by conceiving them as relational categories.  See Hall, who contends that the poem “distinguishes two modes of consciousness: the one predominantly determined by ‘the clear universe of things around’ (1. 40); the other, described by Shelley as poetic and imaginative, of a freer, more active kind” (1973: 240). See also Bode (1992: 92).  “The archontic power, which also gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation. By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs” (Derrida 1995: 10).  For David Hume’s (ambivalent) influences in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”, see e. g. Hall (1973: 202– 205); Abroon (2001: 167– 168); O’Neill (2008: xxii); or Plotnitsky (2005: 83 – 88).

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Although not negating the existence of an extra-textual material world, it has to be nevertheless conceived through imagination, i. e. in imagination’s relationship to otherness (Abroon 2001: 167– 168): “Imagination, […] as a means of perception, has nothing to do with being in its ontological existence” (Abroon 2001: 167). Its (archiving) medium is language (and in its further manifestations, writing and print) together with its inherent metaphoricity, which evolves over time “into signs for literal facts” (Abroon 2001: 168) until the poet de- and reconfigures their metaphorical quality (Abroon 2001: 168 – 169). In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley writes accordingly: the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they [the poets; D.K.] express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them; become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be “the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world” – and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. (Shelley 1965: 111)

Thus, following Bode, metaphors are primarily constituted because of the similarities between their respective referents (i. e. those of tenor and vehicle), which are fundamentally grounded in their reference to (external) reality. Bode, tellingly, compares Shelley’s conception of the mind as “Behälter” (‘container’) – essentially an archive – whose capacity to store things directly depends on existing links/relations (within the mind), and which may increase due to new combinations/relations (Bode 2008: 167– 170); also note in this context the reference to Francis Bacon in the quoted passage, who, according to Shelley, “considers the faculty which perceives them [the relations of things; D.K.] as the storehouse of axioms” (Shelley 1965: 111), i. e. as archive alike. Against this backdrop, then, the poem’s concluding question must be interpreted as decisively rhetorical: Mont Blanc would be nothing, i. e. a non‐signifying yet powerful materiality (!), without imagination’s capacity to provide it with (transcendental and sublime) meaning (Bode 2008: 172– 174; Bode 1992: 92; see also O’Neill 2001: 148). The mountain’s silence, i. e. the fact that matter lies beyond the realm of language, together with its nonetheless overwhelming presence thereby unfolds the incommensurable gap between subject and object, between language/text and material world (Economides 2005: 108).

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This awareness of language/writing and print as precarious archiving media leads us to a further self-reflexive layer of the poem, namely that of Mont Blanc as a metaphor for the poem as archive. In particular, the strong (metaphorical) connection between Mont Blanc and the concepts of language/writing/print establishes a second-order discourse on the poem’s archival act through print, writing and imagination. To begin with, Shelley’s conception of language in “Mont Blanc” is marked by a desire for originality (i. e. in the sense of possessing the origin) and totality, hinting at the subject’s fever to archive. While, as has been shown in a related context, the river running down the mountain constitutes a metaphor for language/print (a strong sense of motion that is also reminiscent of the signifier’s spatialisation and temporalisation), a closer look at the river’s source turns out to be of particular interest. Its origin, i. e. the origin of “Power”, is the summit of Mont Blanc (Hall 1973: 216 – 217), to which “Shelley returns almost obsessively throughout the poem” (Gottlieb 2016: 166), and which he conceives through discourses of the sublime:

III […] Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene; Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone, And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously Its shapes are heap’d around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven.—Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be, But for such faith, with Nature reconcil’d; […]

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V Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. The secret Strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! (Shelley 2000a: ll. 60 – 79, 127– 144)

Similar to the previously discussed depictions of the sublime as spatial archives of originality and totality (see chapter III), Shelley identifies Mont Blanc with transcendental originality. This is suggested through references to infinity, such as in “[Mont Blanc; D.K.] piercing the infinite sky”, the mountain’s “unfathomable deeps” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 60, 64), or his experiencing a sense of eternity at the sight of Mont Blanc (“all seems eternal now”; Shelley 2000a: l. 75), paralleled by a sense of terror given nature’s radical, indifferent alterity and destructiveness²⁹⁶ – a sense of terror that is also reminiscent of Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime. The summit thereby constitutes the source of the “everlasting universe of things”, i. e. a “secret Strength of things” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 1, 139) repeatedly identified as “power” (e. g. in “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there”; Shelley 2000a: l. 127). Hence, not only is the summit associated with transcendence but also with the notion of originality, the source and beginning of things. This is also indicated via his question as to whether this place “[i]s […] the scene / Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young / Ruin? […] or did a sea / Of fire envelop once this silent snow?” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 71– 74), linking the mountain’s sublime, transcendental originality to the idea of geological origins. Read as a metaphor for writing, finally, the summit is a figuration of (the desire for and fiction of) a transcendental signified from which meaning in language is derived: “The secret Strength of things / Which governs

 For nature’s indifference and alterity in “Mont Blanc” and the terror it evokes, see Bode (2008: 177– 178).

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thought, and to the infinite dome / Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 139 – 141). That is, Mont Blanc’s sublime summit is the source of “the secret Strength of things”, constituting a transcendental signified “which governs thought” (i. e. within the metaphor’s logic: language, writing, imagination since perception and thought are conceived in terms of writing/language as archives). Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that the depiction of the summit and its surroundings are predominantly characterised by stasis and silence in contrast to the river’s motion. Accordingly, Shelley relates it to silence (e. g. “still and solemn”; “calm darkness”; “Winds contend / Silently there” or “Power dwells apart in its tranquility, / Remote, serene”; Shelley 2000a: ll. 128, 130, 134– 135, 96 – 97) and images of motionlessness (“Mont Blanc appears–still, snowy and serene” or as figured by its “ice and rock; broad vales between / Of frozen floods”; Shelley 2000a: ll. 61, 63 – 64). In other words, the summit as transcendental signified is (necessarily) not affected by the spatialisation and temporalisation of the signifier (as embodied by the flowing river). It represents the zero point of signification from which not only the signification process originates, but also where it eventually returns to: the river originates from high above, runs down the mountain, “[b]reathes its swift vapours to the circling air” (Shelley 2000a: l. 126) and returns as a snowflake to the summit – a spatial metaphor for the conception of language as a self-contained system, i. e. not differential ad infinitum but ultimately based on the existence of a transcendental signified. In so doing, Shelley discloses a feverish desire to archive, i. e. a desire for originality, wholeness and transcendence through the archival act via language, writing and, ultimately, imagination. However, this sense of transcendental/sublime presence through such archival acts is merely an imaginatively replenished void given the unbridgeable gab between subject and material world (Bode 2008: 174). Tellingly, the mountain peak and its power are “Remote, serene, and inaccessible [my emphasis; D.K.]” (Shelley 2000a: l. 97). The line quoted above, “all seems eternal now”, turns out to be deeply ambivalent inasmuch as it not only doubts this imaginative vision (“seems”) but also locates the sublime’s transcendental timelessness within a temporal frame (note the oxymoronic quality of “eternal now [my emphasis; D.K.]”). Together with the summit’s frequent identification with instances of silence, which point to a realm of being beyond language²⁹⁷, Mont Blanc emerges  See also Abroon (2001: 159): “Mont Blanc is the symbol of thingness, thing without referentiality; a sign, though it cannot properly be called so, with no signified. It exists where there is no linguistic or sign system, and therefore, it is beyond understanding. It is simply out there, a pure presence and no more.”

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as a materiality that can be imaginatively identified as transcendental signified and as an origin for meaning, but which is, in the end, only a retrospectively constructed textual effect (“And what were thou […]”). Again, the alleged transcendental signified which is projected onto the mountain’s peak is equally subjected to the same temporality and spatialisation as the signifier since it is constructed through language. And the fundamental condition of the signifier is its différance, which the poem alludes to through images of temporalisation and spatialisation (represented by the core metaphor of the streaming river) as well as by the spectrality of meaning: The “everlasting universe of things” (Shelley 2000a: l. 1) apprehended by the archiving mind (through language) is only spectrally present/absent, “Now dark–now glittering–now reflecting gloom–” (Shelley 2000a: l. 3), or, as can be seen in the various references to ghosts, shades, phantoms and “some faint image” within the “still cave of witch Poesy” (Shelley 2000a: ll. 47, 44). Not least, the poem’s multiple self-reflexive structure – i. e. Mont Blanc as an external object and simultaneously a metaphor for the act of (its) perception, a metaphor for writing/print and eventually mirroring the poem “Mont Blanc” as such – dissolves the opposition between inside and outside, between object- and meta-level, between signifier and signified, altogether undermining the (imagined) concept of an origin prior to the signifier and, conversely, foregrounding the latter’s irreducibility; an idea that Shelley also developed in “The Triumph of Life” (1822) through the metaphor of light and self‐reflexive mirror structures alike.²⁹⁸ This is further suggested by the poem’s complex intertextual structure, echoing authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lucretius, Byron, Peacock, Plato, Hesiod, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Charlotte Smith and numerous others:²⁹⁹ “we are at pains to find a single sentence that does not arguably point beyond itself to another text. No other Shelley poem […] is more densely intertextual than ‘Mont Blanc’” (Hitt 2005: 144). In so doing, the poem signals its interwovenness within a texte général, i. e. within a discursive web of signifiers that refer to other signifiers ad infinitum and without absolute origin. Within the same archival act, thus, the poem discloses the limitations of its own archiving medium. In this way, the sublime rather points to the limits of communication and archival systems,³⁰⁰ exposing the failure of the symbolic

 See Schmitt (2005: 206 – 211) for the linguistic sign’s irreducibility and the unavailability of the origin in “The Triumph of Life” via the use of the metaphor of light and self‐reflexive mirror structures.  See Hitt (2005) for a comprehensive overview and reading of the poem’s intertextuality.  See, in a similar context, Economides (2005: 90, 100 – 101) and her reading of the poem with the help of Luhmann’s systems theory.

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faced with the desire for completeness. Put differently, it exposes the archive’s fever (i. e. the self‐destructiveness of the archive) in the light of the subject’s archival fever and the totalising attributes it projects onto the archiving media of language/imagination and print. This field of tension between the fever to archive and the archive’s fever not only underlies the poem’s opposed (and yet interrelated) poles of idealistic epistemology and materialist ontology (Bode 2008: 158, 161, 163, 174– 175; Keach 2004: 36 – 37)³⁰¹, but also fundamentally contributes to the spectral nature of the poem “Mont Blanc” as archive.

 See also Keach (2004: 40): “The power of his [Shelley’s; D.K.] writing springs from a relentlessly experimental effort both to reclaim words from ‘things as they are’ and to transform while acknowledging writing’s necessary and inevitable belonging to the realm of materiality.”

VI Afterword: Romantic Archive Fever and Beyond The present study has shown that what is traditionally labelled as the so-called “Romantic Period” – in a more general sense, the late-18th to early-19th century – coincides with a large systemic, epistemic and (media) technological transition, which engendered a (fundamentally modern) zeitgeist that can be conceived with the help of the concept of “archive fever”. On the one hand, socio-historical developments and modernising processes led to the construction of numerous and manifold archives/archiving techniques together with the accumulation/systematisation of the respective objects and/or documents. The expansion of the Empire developed in combination with the creation of maps and a gathering of cultural artefacts exhibited in the newly established museums; knowledge in the course of the institutionalisation of the sciences had to be systematised and fixed. Moreover, an intensified sense of temporality emerged, manifesting itself not only in a fascination for the (idealised, national) past, but also in the prolific field of historiography and antiquarianism. These developments were accompanied by (media‐) technological evolutions that fostered profound changes in the history of mediation, surfacing in a general change from orality to print due to a proliferation of paper products (i.e. the “age of paper”; Stauffer 2006: para. 8) together with an increasing commercialisation and professionalisation of the publishing industry. On the other hand, these progressive and productive developments were accompanied by a pressing awareness of loss. In particular, the experience of a metaphysical crisis (religion vs. science vs. art; but also the feeling of estrangement due to the loss of space in the context of the Enclosure acts and urbanisation), political upheaval, and a general awareness of the fragility of the new mass medium of paper (a fragility that is not only conceivable in relation to its precarious materiality, such as in the case of decaying paper, but that also becomes relevant when considering its overwhelming amount). The feverish desire to collect, systematise and construct diverse archives turns out to be a relief strategy in view of an increasingly complex, fragmented and mediated lifeworld. It has been argued that it is within this paradoxical interrelation of accumulation and loss, the desire for wholeness/originality and its dissemination, between memory and forgetting,

Note: Parts and ideas of this chapter (ch. VI) were previously published by De Gruyter: Kerler, David. “Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats”. Anglia 138:3 (2020): 355 – 383. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-007

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construction and destruction, where the notion of “archive fever” takes its first decisive form and where the Romantic movement emerges. The examples analysed have revealed the ways in which the notion of the archive and archival practices feature as manifold traces in the sujets, aesthetics, discourses and materialities of Romantic poetry. Major points of reference were: (1) References to physical repositories/buildings/places acting as archives. Lord Byron’s appropriation of Newstead Abbey in “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” and his depictions of Venice and the Coliseum in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for example, function both as a place of remembrance and selffashioning through the (re)-construction of (idealised) origins. In a more abstract sense, John Keats conceives the elusive phenomenon of melancholia in spatial terms as “shrine”, and Percy Bysshe Shelley explores the persistence of (artistic) memory and the archiving medium of visual and textual art through the statue of Ozymandias. Romantic aesthetics were similarly explored by resorting to repositories as, for example, in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (the mind as “mansion” for imaginative activity), the poem as “temple” in Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”, the pleasure-dome as a metaphor for the sublime in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, or Anna Barbauld’s ice‐house as a space/repository where (primarily male) Romantic aesthetics are stored and negotiated anew out of a feminine perspective. (2) References to, and applications of, various archival practices/discourses: In many of the analysed poems, the act of gathering/collecting occupies an important space. Major examples were John Keats’s odes, in which the rhetoric and logic of collecting/archiving are closely interrelated with the speaker’s melancholic disposition, i. e. constituting a multifaceted symptom of his excessive, narcissistic fixation on the lost object (the Kristevian notion of the Thing). While Byron’s listing of objects/relics in his “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” complements the (re‐)construction of Newstead Abbey as a place of remembrance, i. e. as an idealised genealogical archive, through which he strives to construct (and stage) his own identity, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is an archaeology of similarly idealised (collective) origins. Harold’s (and the speaker’s) journey and representation of spaces as spatial archives thereby mirror the period’s archival fever, i. e. its numerous expeditions together with the desire to excavate, gather and preserve cultural artefacts. Moreover, the paradoxical interplay of construction and destruction, of preservation and fragmentation, emerges as a decisive aspect of various archival practices: from questions of imagination (e. g. its synthesising power representing an archival act of “consignation” which, at the same time, has disruptive forces), to the harmonising and simultaneously fragmenting power of the genre as archive (e. g. Coleridge’s “Christabel”, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray”), to the paradoxical “subject as

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archive” verging on the threshold between sublimatory archival mourning and destructive archival melancholia (Keats’s odes, Byron, and the sublime spaces as de/construction of the Thing in Wordsworth’ “Nutting” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”). On a further level of abstraction, the poems’ texture referred to and made use of archival techniques, such as the use of annotations and footnotes/endnotes (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; “Beachy Head”), paratextual elements functioning in the sense of the Derridean exergue by exerting a classificatory/hermeneutic authority over the archived material (e. g. in “On Leaving Newstead Abbey”, the preface in “Kubla Khan”, or “Christabel”), but also elements as, for example, the inscription on the statue of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. Finally, references to various archival media and their problematisation on a meta‐level – through which the poems stage their own mediality – play an important role (3). These comprise, most notably, issues pertaining to genres as archives (e. g. the sonnet in “Ozymandias”, the fragment in Coleridge’s “Christabel”, or Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as a palimpsest of various genres), language itself and the (precarious) materiality of writing/print in the light of the age of paper. The latter represents an additional important topic in Coleridge’s “Christabel”, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and “Mont Blanc”. Moreover, William Blake’s “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence must be mentioned, particularly as it stages a media/archival evolution from pre‐symbolic forms of signification to orality and, eventually, to writing/ print as a gradual loss of innocence. These manifestations and traces of archives, their practices and discourses have been analysed with a focus on three basic levels (spatial depictions, the speaker’s subjectivity and the poem as a framing structure together with its mediality/materiality), which, although being analytically separated for the sake of emphasising thematic concerns, are deeply intertwined. Considered as a whole, they disclose two central aspects which I have described by drawing on the Derridean concept of “archive fever”, and which manifested themselves in multifaceted ways: firstly, a feverish/compulsive desire to archive, i. e. “suffering” from archive fever, whose origins were primarily rooted in fundamental experiences of loss. The latter comprised, for example, the loss of places (John Clare), the loss of ideals (e. g. Byron‘s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), the loss of the maternal object (John Keats’s odes; William Wordsworth‘s “Nutting” and Lucy poems), as well as lost time and the awareness of temporality (Byron‘s “On Leaving Newstead Abbey”, Wordsworth‘s “Tintern Abbey” and “There Was a Boy”, Shelley‘s “Ozymandias”). The archival fever becomes apparent in a compulsive attachment to the lost object, excessive accumulations of (lost) objects, structures of repetition, and finally in a desire to possess the original/idealised (lost) object

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and/or a desire to return to an original place of being through the performativity of the archival act (e. g. in the de/construction of sublime spaces in “Nutting” and “Kubla Khan”, or in the affective impact of the semiotisation of the symbolic in Keats’s odes). This, however, ultimately lays bare the underlying void of such an archival fever, the (lost) object’s spectrality, surfacing in its most extreme form as a (self-destructive) melancholic disposition. Secondly, my examples have shown the precarious nature of the archive itself (i. e. the “sickness” or “trouble” of the archive) by exposing the (de)constructive character of memory, language, writing and various archival media. This not only affected “external” archives (including language/writing, organisational techniques, systematisation/classification, processes of supplementation, precarious materiality and its temporality), but also on a psychological level, the melancholic subject itself. That is, the introjection and destruction of the lost object (or rather the introjection of the affect of loss via the object’s destruction) emerges as a (compulsive, feverish) archival strategy of the melancholic, which is fundamentally based on the paradoxical forces/drives working within the archive (i. e. storage/conservation and destruction; conservation as/ through destruction). Overall, both of the tendencies outlined, the “archive’s fever” and the “fever to archive”, thereby turn out to be closely interrelated and as determinative for Romantic subjectivity, aesthetics and its sujets. Their interplay proves, moreover, to be strongly entangled with the phenomenon of melancholia. Not only was the experience of loss the origin and symptom of “archive fever” and of the melancholic disposition, but sublimatory mourning and destructive melancholia – the construction and destruction of archives and their objects – also appear in various forms and with varying accentuations throughout the texts analysed. In conjunction with the three basic thematic areas outlined (spaces, the subject’s psychology, the poem itself), these accentuations determine the specific character of the individual poems and illustrate the multi-layered presence of the notion of “archive fever” in British Romanticism. *** Romanticism was an incisive epoch whose influence holds great importance for our modern world and, indeed, for the construction of modern subjectivity. The outlined archive fever and its different manifestations did not end with the Romantic period but has re‐appeared and evolved in new forms, thematic concerns and technologies flanked by socio-historical and cultural developments over the course of succeeding centuries. To the same extent that the discursive, aesthetic and material manifestations of archive fever in British Romanticism have proven to consist of a multitude of forms and thematic concerns, its

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further developments are similarly marked by an extensive degree of variety and complexity, and can thus be only cursorily outlined at this point. Technological and archival innovations continued throughout the course of the 19th century. As Graham J. Murphy observes, the “Victorian era holds a place of prominence in the feverish evolution of the archive” (2015: 2). Especially noteworthy are the evolution of photography, the introduction of commercial typewriters or phonographs. These play an important role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which is not only concerned with aspects of Gothic horror but first and foremost with contemporary archival media³⁰² and “nineteenth-century trends of organizing information” (Radick 2013: 502). Against this backdrop, the question arises whether there is a link between the psychodynamic drives represented in Dracula (the pleasure principle vs. the reality principle as manifested in its temporal structures, i. e. a timeless quality vs. temporality³⁰³) and the presence of archival technology/practices – an interrelation that might be understood more deeply with the help of the concept of archive fever. Further examples can be found in H.G. Wells’s works that deal with the utopian quality of the archive, i. e. the archive as the ideal for (coherently) unifying and summarising (all) information (Murphy 2015: 2). As Murphy argues using the example of zoos and zoological gardens as “grand archives” (2015: 2) in Wells’s “The Empire of Ants” (1905) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), the archives represented in these texts “raise the question of the archive, namely, the question of the politics of archiving and archival codetermination of materiality and meaning” (2015: 1– 2), yet ultimately undermining human notions/utopias of unifying and totalising archival practices (2015: 1– 14). A similar scepticism is also a determining factor in Wells’s Time Machine (1895). Accordingly, the derelict museum/library of the Eloi can be read as a cipher for (national) degeneration, that is, oblivion in the decadence of the fin de siècle as a strategy of relief in view of an unbearable archival strain. We might hear echoes here of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts on the necessity of history and its disadvantages. In Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874), Nietzsche (1954: 209 – 219) points out that history/memory is a necessity for being human, but an excess thereof will produce the opposite effect – an observation that might be also relevant for the notion of the “troubled” archive. Finally, the question of the archive proves to be equally important in turning our attention towards the 20th and 21st centuries. Modernism’s seminal literary

 See, for example, Wicke (1992) and Kittler (1993).  See Middeke (2004: 175 – 213) for a psychoanalytical, Freudian reading of Dracula with a particular focus on its temporal structures.

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work, the fragmentary “The Waste Land” (1922) by T.S. Eliot, presents an impressive literary‐intertextual archive of our cultural heritage, even though it ultimately testifies to the breakdown of communication and the impossibility/unavailability of such (poetical) archives. Alike a post-war text, Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) “ostentatiously plays with its own materiality and blurs the limit between real and fictional archives” (Lozier 2013: 36). Within the context of the devastation wrought by the Second World War and its mass destruction and murder, Lozier argues that the novel is characterised by an archive fever that both “echoes the destruction that was taking place at the time of its writing, […] [and] also anxiously and compulsively resists it” (2013: 37). This becomes apparent in the novel’s (absurd and feverish) gathering of items/things/objects/actions and its postposed addenda, the latter of which perform, record and, not least, undermine the archiving process (2013: 36 – 42). Despite the destructive tendencies within these archival processes, nevertheless, Watt gives testament to the creative potential of archive fever as it is rather a “jeu d’archive” (Lozier 2013: 49) – a creative potential amidst the archive’s paradoxical interplay between preservation and destruction that is also characteristic of the Romantic poems analysed throughout this study (albeit surfacing in different forms). Emerging from a (Modernist) awareness of disenchantment towards the world and incisive historical events such as the sobering experience of two devastating World Wars or the student revolutions in the late 1960s, Postmodernism and Poststructuralism contested all-encompassing/totalising (grand) narratives (Jean‐François Lyotard) together with their (de)constructive textuality and discursiveness (e. g. Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault); and, by implication, also the fiction of totalising archival practices (Prescott 2008; Nesmith 2002). Especially in a postcolonial context, the (repressive) power structures of archives and their constructive character are addressed and critically questioned (see, exemplarily, the articles in Hamilton et al. 2002). As Ward and Wisnicki (2019) point out in their recent contribution regarding the postcolonial digital archive and its role in the digital humanities, it both “critiques its relationship to imperial culture by acknowledging its rootedness in imperial and colonial pasts” (2019: 200) and “engages with postcolonial and archival theories to reinterpret the imperial and colonial ideologies embedded in the archive’s primary materials” (2019: 200) via digital and critical recontextualisation (2019: 200). Despite such reservations about archives and their practices, i. e. a critical awareness of their constructive character and (discursive) power structures, however, the notion of the archive still plays a central role in contemporary society. Pierre Nora had already noted this in the 1980s, stating that “the obsession of the archive is a mark of our times” (Nora qtd. in Arvatu 2011: 142). It is thus not surprising that the humanities experienced a so-called “archival turn”

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(Arvatu 2011: 142; Fertig 2011: 1; Friedrich 2013: 21– 23; for a critical evaluation, see Lepper and Raulff 2016: 4– 6) around the turn of the millennium, which is closely related to the media transition from analogue to digital. While the Romantic period was crucially influenced by the transition from orality to print, this shift from analogue to digital constitutes the paradigmatic (archival) shift of our time.³⁰⁴ This shift is, tellingly, equally accompanied by a historical period characterised by experiences of fundamental loss and threat (e. g. the trauma of the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars, the Cold War, Apartheid, soaring financial markets in the 1990s, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the financial crisis 2008/2009, Brexit, and the recent Covid-19 pandemic). There is an interesting tension between what Hal Foster diagnoses as an “archival impulse” in the light of a “failure in cultural memory” in the postmodern era (2004: 21– 22), on the one hand, and the digital age’s alleged unlimited potential and capacity for storing data along with possibilities for its diffusion, on the other hand. The rapidly increasing evolution in digital storage media and capacity (floppy disks, magnetic tape, hard drives, flash drives, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, cloud backup…) provides space for the similarly enormous and ever-increasing amounts of data (photos, music, videos, etc.). Yet, not only is there a risk of losing track of such vast accumulations of data, but they are also susceptible to data degradation due to their precarious materiality (such as decomposing CDs or the limited life span of flash memory). A feverish desire to archive thus coincides here with the imminent (threat of a) loss of the very archive. On a related note, social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram can be regarded as public archives of the self, where the subject’s (social) identity is performatively constructed via the act of accumulating/archiving (e. g. photos, videos, texts etc.). However, we might also ask whether this kind of archival fever is not merely a sublimatory strategy to fill/cover the void of the fragmented, decentred identity of the postmodern subject (becoming its own precarious archive). Finally and relatedly, the cult of celebrity nowadays can be traced back to Romanticism, where Lord Byron represents, according to Tom Mole (2007), one of the first modern celebrities (2007: xi) – a cult of celebrity that, interestingly, emerged in a large part as a reaction to “information overload and alienation” (2007: 155) at that time. A promising field of study is the comprehensive and systematic survey of how contemporary literature and culture reflect and engage with the outlined (media) evolution of the archive, its practices and discourses. How does

 See, exemplarily, Lubar (1999); Moss (2008); Stevenson (2008) for the archive in the context of the Digital Revolution and the Internet.

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postcolonial literature, for example, critically engage with archival processes, their power structures and, in so doing, modify the existing archive?³⁰⁵ Can the literary phenomenon of intertextuality, for example, be read as a manifestation of archive fever insofar as the text constitutes an (excessive?) archive of the literary tradition but signals its dissolution (e. g. through the underlying processes of intertextual de- and recontextualisation; i. e. acts of archival consignation)³⁰⁶ at the same time? A highly intertextual novel, John Banville’s The Sea (2005) stages the protagonist’s work of mourning as an archival process in which he remembers through spaces and by resorting to numerous intertextual/intermedial references, which function as semantic frameworks that aim to place his memories within a meaningful narrative. In so doing, it is not only the subject who becomes an archive of his loss(es), but so too does the novel itself, constituting an impressive intertextual archive.³⁰⁷ The idea of the “subject as archive” is also a central aspect in Jonathan Boulter’s monograph, Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (2011). Using the example of the contemporary authors Auster, Mitchell, Saramago and Murakami, Boulter explores “the implications of the idea that the subject, in loss, becomes an archive of loss, a site where the memory of loss and trauma is maintained in a kind of crypt” (2011: 3). The literary‐cultural output of a specific historical/literary period is – together with other socio-historical developments – closely related to technological/media/archival evolutions; that is, such output is not merely a product of these evolutions (and mediated through the latter) but also reflects, contests, and participates in their discourses and material practices. Taking the perspective on literature as a multi-layered (meta‐)archive – i. e. literature as an aesthetic means to (critically) reflect, comment on and inscribe itself into archival practices, their discourses and their materialities/medialities – can lead to valuable insights and interrelations that have not yet been apprehended. The critical lens of “archive fever”, which has been significantly expanded upon throughout the course of this study, proves to be particularly applicable for these purposes as it not only reveals the (inter)dependencies of material and immaterial/mental practices, but it also allows for the productive combination

 See, exemplarily, Shetty/Bellamy (2000); Vijay Mishra’s monograph Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy (2019); or the essays in Easton/Farrant/Wittenberg (eds.), J.M. Coetzee and the Archive: Fiction, Theory and Autobiography (2021).  For the (de)constructive functions of intertextuality in the contemporary novel, see Kerler (2013).  See Kerler (2013: 195 – 225) for the relation between intertextuality and remembering in John Banville’s The Sea.

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of academic disciplines such as new materialism, object/material culture, media history, cultural studies, literary studies/aesthetics, historiography, sociology, psychoanalysis, textual history and (cultural) memory studies.

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269

Index aesthetics 1, 3–5, 7–9, 11, 13, 28, 33–36, 40, 42, 44 f., 49, 54, 57–62, 64–66, 68, 70, 125, 130 f., 134, 137, 140, 142, 160, 163, 165, 169 f., 173–179, 181–187, 191, 193 f., 219, 221, 241, 243, 247 f. affect 1, 4 f., 11, 36, 45, 80 f., 121, 147–153, 159–166, 169, 222, 243 antiquarianism 2, 7, 22 f., 25 f., 144, 240 anxiety 3 f., 7, 10, 29, 36 f., 77 f., 80, 83, 85, 87 f., 90, 113, 140, 144, 178, 188, 197, 219, 221, 228, 230 Bacon, Francis 234 Bakhtin, Michail – Chronotopos 9, 50 f., 53 f., 57, 61, 75–79, 82, 95 f., 109, 116 ballad 12, 23, 66, 100, 112, 126, 134 f., 137, 195, 217, 228 f. Banville, John – The Sea 247 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia – Eighteen Hundred and Eleven 168 – “Inscription for an Ice-House” 12, 169– 177, 185 – “To Mr. S. T. Coleridge” 174 Beckett, Samuel – Watt 245 Blake, William – and his “infernal method” 229 – “Earth’s Answer” 226 – “Infant Joy” 227 – “Introduction” (Songs of Experience) 61, 225 f. – “Introduction” (Songs of Innocence) 222 f., 225, 229 – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 52, 174 Borges, Jorge Luis – “El Aleph” 117 Brawne, Fanny 140 Burke, Edmund 95, 110 f., 173–175, 181, 186, 236 Burton, Robert 93 f., 142, 149

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775556-009

Byron, George Gordon – “A Fragment” 85 – Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 10, 25, 28, 45, 87, 90 f., 102–110, 194, 241 f. – “Elegy on Newstead Abbey” 85 – Hours of Idleness 85 f. – “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” 28, 85– 89, 108, 144, 241 f. – “To an Oak in the Garden of Newstead Abbey” 89 celebrity 3, 28, 102, 246 Chatterton, Thomas 27, 202 childhood 32, 51, 82, 119, 128 f., 131, 137, 204, 218 Clare, John – and enclosures 73 – “Clifford Hill” 84 f. – “Eternity of Nature” 75 f. – “On Visiting a Favourite Place” 51, 73–77 – “Sighing for Retirement” 73, 75–77 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – and the sublime 111 – Biographia Literaria 47, 62 f., 101, 110, 174, 217 – “Christabel” 12, 195, 202–222, 228, 241 f. – “Kubla Khan” 11, 48, 50, 64 f., 94, 110, 112–114, 116–125, 174, 194, 203, 241– 243 – “Letter to Thomas N. Longman” 203 – “Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan” 112, 114, 123 – “The Nightingale” 207 – “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 91– 93, 95–102, 139, 242 – The Statesman’s Manual 111, 117 – “To John Thelwall” 93, 118 collecting 2, 14, 16, 25, 33, 45, 65, 68, 87, 109, 141–143, 145, 147, 157, 163, 165, 173, 178, 183, 185 f., 193 f., 196, 227, 233, 240 f., 245 Compton, Henry 21

Index

compulsion 5, 9, 11, 41 f., 44, 53, 60, 68, 88, 92–94, 97 f., 123, 138, 140 f., 143, 148, 153 f., 156 f., 164–167, 208 f., 242 f., 245 Cook, James 94 De Certeau, Michel – The Practice of Everyday Life 48–50, 77 De Quincey, Quatremère 24 De Quincey, Thomas 17 death drive 35 f., 41–45, 59 f., 64, 67 f., 75, 81, 98, 107, 109, 114, 120, 122–124, 139, 153, 157, 163 denial of negation 56 f., 61, 80, 98, 136, 147 f., 150, 153, 155, 158–160, 165 Derrida, Jacques – “Archive Fever” 1, 4–6, 18, 30, 33, 35– 37, 39, 41 f., 45, 50 f., 54, 58–60, 62– 65, 68–70, 77, 82 f., 85, 87, 103, 113, 125, 130, 134, 141, 163, 172, 192, 205, 212, 214, 216, 227, 229, 233 – différance 18 f., 67, 132, 199, 238 – “The Law of Genre” 65, 67, 137, 201 digital technology 2, 6, 15 f., 19, 70, 245 f. dissemination 69, 164, 201, 212, 215, 220, 226, 240 Dürer, Albrecht 149, 158 elegy 135–137, 195 Eliot, T.S. – “The Waste Land” 245 Empire 3, 7, 20 f., 27, 46, 90, 102, 105, 179, 182, 202, 240, 244 empiricism 23, 29 f., 192, 233 enclosures 4, 7, 33, 46, 55, 72 f., 84 f., 240 Enlightenment 2, 20, 26, 32, 37 f., 66, 103, 173 finitude 35–37, 83, 113, 128 forgetting 17–19, 31, 82 f., 142, 240 Foucault, Michel – “Of Other Spaces” 19 f., 24 – The Archaeology of Knowledge 6, 16 f. – “What is an Author?” 16 fragment 12, 64 f., 67 f., 111, 114, 123, 189, 192, 194 f., 200, 202 f., 205, 213 f., 218, 221, 242

271

French Revolution 4, 7, 26, 28, 34, 38, 53, 55, 83, 103 f., 196 Freud, Sigmund 1, 9, 17, 32, 35 f., 41 f., 55, 68, 120, 149, 244 – Beyond the Pleasure Principle 41 f., 45, 153 – Mourning and Melancholia 36, 39, 55, 59, 148 Galenus 149 genre 4, 8 f., 11 f., 23, 40, 45, 62, 64–68, 70, 114, 123, 134–137, 162, 168 f., 173, 179, 181, 184, 189, 191 f., 194 f., 197– 203, 205–208, 210–215, 217, 219–221, 228 f., 241 f. Gibbon, Edward 27, 179, 182 Godwin, William 232 Humboldt, Alexander von 21 Hume, David 29 f., 47, 233 identity 2, 6, 16, 26, 31 f., 53, 56–58, 65, 81, 102–104, 110, 121, 148 f., 153, 163, 166 f., 187, 193, 202, 223, 241, 246 ideology 5, 26, 72, 100, 141, 144, 175, 181, 187 f., 194 imagination 8 f., 37–39, 46 f., 50–52, 58, 62–65, 79, 83, 94, 111, 173 f., 180, 185, 187 f., 200 f., 233–235, 237, 239, 241 Industrial Revolution 4, 7, 33, 46, 72, 83 intermediality 194, 222, 224 f., 247 intertextuality 15 f., 19, 66, 87, 90, 142, 169, 173, 175 f., 186, 194, 224, 238, 245, 247 iterability 67, 69, 215, 221, 225, 228 Johnson, Samuel 21 f. journey 10, 25, 49, 90 f., 93, 95 f., 101– 104, 108–110, 114, 194, 196, 227, 241 Kant, Immanuel 39, 44, 47, 110 f. Keats, John – and loss 139 f. – and the museum 141 – “Letter to George and Thomas Keats” 56 – “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 15, 25, 37, 143 f., 146 f., 152 f., 155–157, 161 f., 165 f., 195

272

Index

– “Ode on Indolence” 148–152, 156–158, 164, 195 – “Ode on Melancholy” 44, 142 f., 145, 147, 156, 158, 163, 166 f., 195 – “Ode to a Nightingale” 142, 150, 152, 156, 162, 164–166 – “Ode to Psyche” 145–147, 154–156, 161– 164, 166, 195, 241 – “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” 141 – “On the Sea” 110 – “To Autumn” 138–140, 143, 157–159, 163, 166, 174, 176 – “To George and Georgiana Keats” 139 f. König, Friedrich 28, 232 Kristeva, Julia 9, 11, 18, 36, 39, 55–61, 80, 98, 119, 128, 130 f., 136, 145, 147–149, 151–153, 159 f., 163, 165 Lacan, Jacques 68, 205 language 4, 9, 12, 16, 18, 21, 29 f., 40, 45, 49, 56–58, 60–62, 67 f., 70, 79, 92, 96 f., 99, 108, 111, 134 f., 147, 155, 159 f., 162–165, 172, 174, 176, 186, 192 f., 198, 201, 221, 225, 227 f., 230, 233–237, 239, 242 f. libraries 15, 17, 20, 24, 141, 196 f., 200 f., 244 liminality 43, 58, 68, 82 f., 85, 97, 176, 200, 205, 213, 226 Locke, John 30, 231 Lovelace, Ada 15 Lyotard, Jean François 245 Macpherson, James 202 – Ossian 27, 87, 90 map vs. tour 49 materiality 1, 3 f., 7, 9–12, 16 f., 19, 25, 29, 35, 40 f., 45, 62, 69 f., 88 f., 92, 106, 112, 146, 176–178, 181, 183 f., 188–193, 195, 197–200, 205, 214, 216, 218, 220 f., 223 f., 228 f., 234, 238–240, 242, 244–246 media 1 f., 4, 11 f., 25, 28, 34, 70, 102, 178, 221–223, 225 f., 228 f., 232, 235, 239 f., 242–244, 246–248 mediality 9–12, 19, 35, 40, 45, 70, 189, 194, 242

memory 1 f., 6, 9 f., 16–19, 31 f., 35, 37, 39, 41, 45, 47, 50, 52, 54, 60, 66, 73 f., 77, 81–83, 87 f., 95, 99, 102 f., 106, 109, 112, 119, 127, 129, 181, 196, 199–201, 240 f., 243 f., 246–248 metre 115 f., 161, 203, 216–221 Milton, John – “Il Penseroso” 143, 207 – “Lycidas” 142 – Paradise Lost 112, 119, 208 Modernism 244 Murray, John 102, 108 museum 3, 15, 19 f., 24 f., 33, 90, 102, 141, 143, 147, 196, 240, 244 negative capability 56, 63, 111, 150, 159 neoclassicism 20, 26, 65, 191 Nicholson, William 232 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 244 Nora, Pierre 17, 245 ode

65, 139, 142–144, 148, 150–152, 155, 157 f., 195 organic unity 39, 51, 54, 75, 174 palimpsest 17, 101, 126, 135, 199, 242 pantheism 38, 94, 101 paper 3–5, 7, 12, 19, 28 f., 33, 70, 134, 146, 189, 197, 221, 223, 228, 231, 240, 242 paradise 34, 38, 42, 52, 54, 58, 76 f., 85, 112, 115, 119, 121 f., 124, 130 f., 226 Petrarchism 162 photography 15, 244 Plato 17, 69, 79, 100, 198, 230, 238 Postmodernism 6, 245 f. Poststructuralism 6, 16, 18, 30, 245 power structures 5 f., 14–17, 19, 34, 62, 64, 175, 245, 247 print 2–4, 7–9, 11 f., 25, 27, 30, 33, 101 f., 132, 134, 169, 178, 181, 188, 192 f., 195, 197 f., 201, 218–221, 223, 225, 227–230, 232, 234 f., 238–240, 242, 246 psychoanalysis 1, 5 f., 11, 18 f., 39, 46, 61, 68, 139 f., 208–211, 244, 248 reader-response

49 f.

Index

religion 37, 52, 54, 94, 111, 139, 214, 229, 240 repetition 1, 3, 31, 41–43, 53 f., 60, 62, 67, 69, 81 f., 84, 97 f., 114, 118, 123 f., 132, 135, 138, 143, 153 f., 156 f., 159, 163, 165, 167, 199, 201, 215, 223, 225, 227, 242 rhyme 161 f., 200, 217 f., 223 f. rhythm 51, 60 f., 78, 81, 160, 218, 220 romance 12, 59, 66, 134 f., 137, 195, 211 f. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel – “The Sonnet” 199 Schlegel, Friedrich – “Athenäums-Fragment 116” 21 Scott, Walter – The Antiquary 23 self-reflexivity 10, 12, 65 f., 120 f., 146, 148, 156 f., 169, 176, 181, 183 f., 187 f., 195, 197, 205, 207 f., 211 f., 215, 217 f., 221, 230, 235, 238 Shakespeare, William 162, 200, 238 – Hamlet 154 – Sonnet 19 15 Shelley, Mary 169 Shelley, Percy Bysshe – A Defence of Poetry 63, 234 – “Hymn of Apollo” 186 – “Hymn of Pan” 186 – “Mont Blanc” 12 f., 46, 49, 110, 230– 233, 235–239, 242 – “Ode to the West Wind” 158 – “Ozymandias” 12, 29, 87, 195, 197–202, 241 f. signified 56, 61, 69, 111, 131, 164 f., 189, 225, 227, 236–238 signifier 12, 56 f., 61, 69 f., 111, 131 f., 136, 147 f., 152, 155, 159, 161–165, 189, 194, 205, 212, 214–216, 218, 220 f., 223, 225–227, 235, 237 f. silence 60, 73, 75 f., 79, 81 f., 97, 99, 106, 110, 124, 148, 153–156, 160, 165, 234, 237 Smith, Charlotte – “Beachy Head” 12, 169 f., 177 f., 180– 194, 203, 242 – Elegiac Sonnets 168, 202

273

sonnet 12, 15, 29, 66, 110, 120 f., 141, 162, 168, 195–202, 228, 242 sound 2–4, 15, 78–80, 83, 95, 115 f., 118, 157, 160, 162, 164, 184–186, 206, 217– 219, 224, 228, 231, 236 spaces vs. places 48–50 Spenser, Edmund – Sonnet 76 121 – Sonnet 77 120 – The Faerie Queene 103 stasis 42 f., 60, 75 f., 81, 97 f., 107, 124, 139, 148, 153–159, 163, 165 f., 170, 173, 176, 237 steam printing 3, 28, 232 f. Stoker, Bram – Dracula 244 Straus, Erwin W. 153 subjectivity 5, 10 f., 20, 32, 35, 39, 46, 49, 55, 80, 82, 91, 108, 146, 152, 178, 193, 242 f. sublime 8, 10–13, 37 f., 42, 44, 46, 48, 53 f., 56 f., 60, 79 f., 94 f., 101, 109–119, 121–123, 125, 139, 152, 162 f., 173–176, 179–181, 183–187, 191, 194, 230 f., 233– 238, 241, 243 suprasegmental structure 61, 70, 119, 131, 160–163, 165, 218 temporality 26 f., 32, 36 f., 39, 47, 51–53, 58, 61, 65, 67, 75, 77 f., 80–85, 87, 104, 108, 113, 117, 127, 131–133, 136, 138, 153, 155, 157, 164, 171, 176, 180, 183, 191, 197, 199, 201, 215, 220, 226, 237 f., 240, 242, 244 texture 12 f., 70, 178, 183, 193 f., 223, 228, 242 Thing 45, 56 f., 58–61, 81, 119, 126, 128– 131, 136–138, 140, 145, 147 f., 150, 152, 154–156, 159–162, 165 f., 195, 241 f. threshold 12, 60, 82, 153, 213, 221, 230, 242 tradition 22, 37 f., 46, 65–67, 69, 103 f., 111 f., 123, 126, 128, 131, 133–135, 137, 162, 179, 181, 189, 197 f., 202, 220, 247 transcendence 76, 79, 81, 94, 96, 100, 102, 110, 139, 150, 180, 236 f.

274

Index

unconscious 18, 39, 42, 59, 96, 109, 113, 120, 205, 209–211, 226 unpleasure 43 f., 61, 122, 124 Veneziano, Agosto – Abraham and Isaac 222 Victorian era 244 Von Bingen, Hildegard 38 Walter, John II 232 war 86, 104, 245 f. Warburg, Aby M. 16 Wells, H.G. 244 – “The Empire of Ants” 244 – The First Men in the Moon 244 – The Time Machine 244 Wordsworth, Dorothy 83 Wordsworth, William – “A slumber did my spirit seal” 131 – “I travell’d among unknown Men” 130, 135 – “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree” 173 – “Lines Written in Early Spring” 75 – “Lucy Gray” 11, 29, 126–138, 195, 241

– “Nutting” 32, 81, 110–116, 120–125, 242 f. – “Preface to the Edition of 1815” 62–64, 80 – “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)” 62 f., 80, 219 – “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways” 129 – “Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Heads” 168 – “Strange fits of passion” 129, 134 f. – The Prelude 32, 110, 115 – “The Sublime and the Beautiful” 111 – “There was a Boy” 32, 52, 77–79, 81 f., 131 – “Three years she grew” 127, 129, 134 f. – “Tintern Abbey” 46, 50, 74, 76–81, 83, 115, 178, 182, 241 f. – “W.W. to Joseph Cottle” 96 – “We are Seven” 52 Young, Edward – “Night Thoughts” Žižek, Slavoj

52

5, 9, 39, 43, 57, 61, 68