Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud 9780226390680

Citation preview

Romantic Things

M a ry Jacobus

Romantic Things

A Tr ee , a Ro ck , a Cloud The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Paperback edition 2015 Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   2 3 4 5 6 isbn-13: 978-0-226-39066-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-27134-7 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-39068-0 (e-book) 10.7208/chicago/9780226390680.001.0001 Permission to quote Seamus Heaney, “Rilke: After the Fire” and “Rilke: The Apple Orchard,” from District and Circle, by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber and of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Permission to quote Alice Oswald, “Woods etc.” and “Autobiography of a Stone,” from Woods etc. (©2005), is gratefully acknowledged to Faber and Faber and United Agents Ltd. Permission to quote from W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, translated by Michael Hamburger (2004), is gratefully acknowledged to New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. “At the End,” “Like a Dog,’’ “Please Send Me,’’ “When Lightning’’ by W. G. Sebald, ©2004 by The Estate of W. G. Sebald, translation ©2004 by Michael Hamburger and Hamish Hamilton. Title page illustration from William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808), vol. 1, facing 131. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacobus, Mary. Romantic things : a tree, a rock, a cloud / Mary Jacobus. pages ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-39066-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 0-226-39066-7 (cloth : alkaline paper)  1. Nature in literature.  2. Romanticism.  3. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation.  I. Title. pn1065. j26 2012 809'.9336—dc23 2012003655 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

the endless store of things Rare, or at least so seeming, every day Found all about me — William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 1, lines 119–21

contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Gravity of Things

1

chapter 1  Cloud Studies:

10

The Visible Invisible chapter 2  Pastoral, after History:

36

The Apple Orchard chapter 3  Touching Things:

61

“Nutting” and the Standing of Trees chapter 4  Composing Sound:

79

The Deaf Dalesman, “The Brothers,” and Epitaphic Signs chapter 5  “Distressful Gift”:

94

Talking to the Dead chapter 6  The Breath of Life:

114

Wordsworth and the Gravity of Thought chapter 7  “On the Very Brink of Vacancy”:

128

Things Unbeseen chapter 8  Senseless Rocks

150

Notes

177

Index

213

figures 1.1 John Ruskin, “Cloud Perspective: Rectilinear” (1903–8)  23 1.2 John Ruskin, “Cloud Perspective: Curvilinear” (1903–8)  24 1.3 John Constable, Study of Sky and Trees (1821)  27 1.4 John Constable, Cloud Study: Horizon of Trees (1821)  28 1.5 John Constable, Cloud Study (1821)  29 1.6 John Constable, Cloud Study (1822)  30 1.7 John Constable, Study of Cumulus Clouds (1822)  31 2.1 Albrecht Dürer, The Fall (1510)  39 2.2 Location photo from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007)  40 2.3 Location photo from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007)  44 2.4 Location photo from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007)  45 2.5 Albrecht Altdorfer, Lot and His Daughters (1537)  53 2.6 Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees [Apfelbäume] (1987)  58 2.7 Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees [Apfelbäume] (1987)  59 2.8 Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees (sketch) (Apfelbäume [Skizze]) (1987)  60 7.1 François Stella, Ruins of the Coliseum in Rome (1587)  133 7.2 Sir George Beaumont, Peele Castle in a Storm (1805)  135 7.3 Nicholas Saunderson, The Elements of Algebra, in Ten Books (1741)  140 7.4 Jan Peter Tripp, Jan Peter Tripp (2003)  143 7.5 Jan Peter Tripp, W. G. Sebald (2003)  145 7.6 Jan Peter Tripp, Maurice (Moritz) (2003)  146 7.7 Louis-François Roubiliac, Sir Isaac Newton (1755)  148 8.1 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; with Proofs and Illustrations (1795)  152 8.2 Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (2007)  159 8.3 Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (2007)  160 8.4 Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales (1783)  168 8.5 William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England (1808)  173 8.6 William Green, The tourist’s new guide (1819)  174

acknowledgments I have been fortunate to receive a number of invitations to contribute to special issues, edited collections, and conferences. These opportunities have helped to sustain my longstanding interest in Wordsworth’s poetry alongside more recent concerns. The chapter order roughly reflects the order of writing. Chapter 1, “Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible,” was commissioned for a special issue of Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 14 (2006), “Objects, Material, Psychic, Aesthetic,” edited by Sean Homer, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, and Yannis Stavrakakis; I am grateful for permission to republish it here. Chapter 2, “Pastoral after History: The Apple Orchard,” was delivered as the keynote for a graduate conference, “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History,” at Queen Mary College, University of London, in June 2008 and presented at an international conference on Sebald at the University of East Anglia in September 2008. Chapter 3, “Touching Things: ‘Nutting’ and the Standing of Trees,” was written for a colloquium celebrating the work of Geoffrey Hartman at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, in October 2007. Chapter 4, “Composing Sound: The Deaf Dalesman, ‘The Brothers,’ and Epitaphic Signs,” was commissioned for Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint it here. Chapter 5, “Distressful Gift: Talking to the Dead,” was originally presented at a University of Cambridge CRASSH conference, “Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century,” and included in the resulting volume, The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688–1848, edited by Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); it is published here with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The same essay was previously published in “Late Derrida,” a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (Spring 2007), edited by Ian Balfour (copyright 2007, Duke University Press, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the publisher). A shorter version of chapter 6, “The Breath of Life: Wordsworth and the Gravity of Thought,” was written and delivered as part of a panel series, “Genres of Death,” convened by Ian Balfour at the 2008 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference in Toronto in August 2008. Chapter 7, “‘On the Very Brink of Vacancy’: Things ix

Unbeseen,” and chapter 8, “Senseless Rocks,” were both written especially for this volume during the summer of 2010 and take up some of the threads that weave in and out of the earlier essays. Among the friends, colleagues, and students who have inspired, provoked, or sustained my interest in Romanticism, Wordsworth, translation, visual art, and psychoanalysis, I would especially like to thank the following: Ian Balfour, Gillian Beer, John Beer, Peter de Bolla, James Castell, Cynthia Chase, Anne-Lise François, Geoffrey Hartman, Frances Jacobus-Parker, Simon Jarvis, Laura Kirkley, Reeve Parker, Alex Regier, Clive Scott, Gordon Teskey, Marina Warner, and Andrew Webber. I owe special thanks to Alan Thomas at the University of Chicago Press for his editorial encouragement and imagination. I am also grateful to Catriona Gray and to the Newton Trust, Trinity College, Cambridge, for practical assistance in preparing the manuscript. No amount of footnoting can do justice to the cumulative effects of reading, listening, and conversations over the years at Cornell University, the University of Cambridge, and elsewhere; known and unknown debts are hereby gratefully acknowledged. Finally, I take this opportunity to acknowledge an enduring debt to my first Wordsworthian teacher: “Methinks I see him stand / As at that moment, with his bough / Of wilding in his hand” (“The Two April Mornings,” ll. 58–60). Note: All references to The Prelude are to the book and line numbers of the AB-Stage reading text of The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), abbreviated Prel. References to Wordsworth’s prose works are to the volumes and pages of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), abbreviated Prose Works.

  |  acknowledgments

introduction

I

the gravit y of things

n Rainer Maria Rilke’s late poem “Gravitation” (“Schwerkraft”), lyric energy’s relation to things—“things in flight,” clouds, falling rain—is poised between gravity and autorecovery. Seemingly unaware of its own motion, like Rilke’s stander or sleeper, or like poured water, “Gravitation” is gravid with what it does not say about the self-sustaining force or “Kraft” of poetry: Centre, extricating yourself from everything, even recovering yourself from things in flight: invincible centre! Stander, through whom earth’s pull Hurtles like drink through thirst. Sleeper, from whom, as though from a crouching cloud, it falls in large and liberal rain.1 Things and persons are held in tension by lyric’s apostrophic power: Center, Stander, Sleeper. The centering here is at once centripetal and centrifugal; the force of gravity becomes the sheer force of poetic language to generate meaning—recovering, hurtling, falling as the “large and liberal rain” of its dissemination on the page. Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” makes the dead “thing” that is Lucy appear inhuman, at once untouched and untouchable even when alive: “She seem’d a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years” (ll. 3–4). Without motion or force, deaf and blind (“She neither hears nor sees”), Lucy is swept up by the gravitational pull of insensate things: “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees!” (ll. 7–8). Newtonian impersonality and first-person lyric collide in the poetic space glossed by my subtitle: “The Gravity of Things.” The unseen revolution of rocks and stones and trees—all that remains of Lucy—hurtle through the poet’s oblivious slumber. Are such things alive or dead? If they move, do they feel? But perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask. As in Rilke’s poem, gravity and language are at once material and immaterial entities; 

we do not know quite how they work, even if we put names like “gravitation” or “apostrophe” to the force or rhetorical figure each invokes. In this sense, Wordsworth’s practice as a lyric poet is proto-Rilkean. Both put lyric poetry’s characteristic activity of naming or invocation into direct relation with the life of things: “it falls.” The “it” that falls is the riddle answered by the poem’s title: “Gravitation” (“Schwerkraft”). Or, as Geoffrey Hartman expresses it apropos of Wordsworth’s Lucy, “It is as if life and death were seeking an interchange or equipoise”2—and not only life and death but the nonequivalent interchange of words and things. Wordsworth himself writes: “Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper.” Imbued with passion, they become weighty actors in their own right: “things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion.”3 Weighed in the balance of feeling, lyric poetry finds its own level. Gravity falls like rain; words hurtle “like drink through thirst.” Heidegger’s “thing” (in his “Das Ding”)—a humble jug—is not merely an everyday utensil or container but, etymologically speaking, a potential “gathering” or place for discussion; his jug becomes a vessel for pouring, outpouring, and hieratic consecration.4 Without in any way endorsing the sacramental implications of the Heideggerian thing, the underlying premise of the present volume is that lyric poetry provides a way of thinking about (and linking) material and immaterial things. These things include the nolonger-human Lucy, trees, rocks, clouds, and abstract categories such as translation, history, and lyric poetry itself. Lyric provides a container for both simple and complex emotions, immediate and more elusive modes of perception—hardly the type of “thinking” traditionally associated with analysis, logic, or linguistic reasoning. Yet these feelings and perceptions form an indispensible element in how we know what (we sense) we know. The essays included here concern moods, internal states, modes of perception and consciousness, or states of being that defy simple definition: deafness and the inability to see; sleeping and not being able to sleep; being alone and being dead; touching and the untouchable. They focus on the materiality of rocks (their hardening or induration) as well as their immateriality (their duration and musicality); the weighty insubstantiality (the visible invisibility) of clouds; and the sense in which trees may be thought of as suffering injury despite their insentience. These things belong to the elusive matter of lyric poetry: things that sound, float, or fall; things imagined as being alive without being animate; things both visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling.5   |  introduction

In Wordsworth’s poetry, things that have never spoken fall silent and things that have never moved acquire strange motion. Things that were never alive in the way that humans live are mourned as if they had died, or they strike terror into the guilty imagination. The Wordsworthian lyric also tends toward epitaph, since both human and nonorganic life end in the grave, muted and stilled, however much they harbor intimations of immortality and animism. Even breathing becomes breathing toward death, just as the gift of a poem becomes a form of conversing with the dead. Wordsworth’s lyrics may be buoyed up by animation—dancing daffodils, wind-tossed waves, flut­ tering leaves—or by the lively movement of the lyric line itself. But they gravitate toward sighs and silence: “Sweetness and breath with the quiet of death, / Peace, peace, peace.”6 Lyric repetition, “weighed in the balance of feeling,” quiets human passion at the border of breath and death. Many of the essays included in this book focus on inanimate natural phenomena: trees, rocks, and clouds, things that are endemic in lyric poetry by both Wordsworth and Rilke, where images from nature are at once perceived objects and prompts for thought. Much as Heidegger’s “Das Ding” alerts us to the jug’s overlooked “nearness,” these essays also explore states that are often overlooked or form part of the taken-for-granted texture of being alive: breathing, listening, and sleeping. At the same time, they explore states of privation—not being able to see or hear; vacancy, blurring, unconsciousness, or death—along with the sheer resistance of things themselves to being seen, sensed, or understood. This resistance includes the human thing as well as the natural, and even the resistance of the poem to being read. Such modes of being or unintentional resistance accentuate the link between things and poetry. We may think in or through things, and in or through lyric poetry. But thinking of this kind can be abruptly end-stopped when we least expect it, whether by intractable concreteness, by ungraspable abstraction, or by the elusiveness of poetic thought. For instance, Wordsworth’s phrase “All thinking things, all objects of all thought” confidently invokes a kind of transcendental gravitation or “motion and a spirit” rolling through all things (“Tintern Abbey,” 101–2). Yet the ways in which these lines simultaneously make and disclaim the distinction between thinking things and objects of thought pose disquieting questions. What is a thinking thing? What motion impels “all objects of all thought”? Or is it only the human thing—the distinctive thing called poetry—that does the vital thinking and moving here? What kind of thing is poetry?7 Poetry’s extended metaphorical vocabulary allows things and poetry (like the defended, rolled-up hedgehog of Derrida’s essay) to be thought together and experienced as rebarbative— the gravity of things  | 

resistant to understanding, translation, or paraphrase but not to memory, feeling, or learning by heart. All the translator can do (as Benjamin argues in “The Task of the Translator”) is to offer a distinct version in another foreign language.8 Recent “thing theory” has tended to suggest that we not only think through things but think through their very resistance to our attempts at co-option—and that our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them.9 Halting and provisional as such knowing can be, it is also associated with the convergence of pleasure and passion that Wordsworth identifies with metrical poetry itself (the “lyrical” ballad). The idea of aesthetic pleasure as a form of knowing or education is inseparable from the lyric’s claims to think. Such claims parallel recent attempts to identify the role of feeling in thought and in theory, as well as the kind of thinking that goes on in metrical poetry.10 Specifically, the essays collected here try to think through things—both literary and phenomenological—that are illuminated by some of the late or recent philosophical writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. For strictly enforced rhetorical and figural modes of reading, any sense of (or in) things is undermined by linguistic undecidability or by alienation from a world of things that is necessarily distanced by both language and consciousness. By contrast, the philosophers I have mentioned are markedly concerned with sense, sensing, and what Wordsworth calls “the language of the sense” (“Tintern Abbey,” l. 109). This language (including poetic language) mediates and reflects upon but does not necessarily estrange either the world of things or the world of thought. The posthumously published work of Merleau-Ponty, the later writings of Derrida, and the poetic, conceptless philosophic writing of Nancy, with its “singular” and “finite” thinking, have all helped to shape my essays (and thinking) about touch and sight, mourning and survival, sleeping and listening.11 Thinking about or through the contours of such writing will be seen to distinguish the literary-critical practice of this collection from the productive strenuousness of de Manian reading, which focuses on rhetorical figures such as apostrophe and prosopopoeia and has produced a distinctive and important school of writing on Romantic poetry.12 While these essays come down on the side of provisionality in reading the human thing that I have called poetry and recognize the difficulty of seeing the human thing itself—whether through our own eyes or the eyes of others—they proceed with greater eclecticism and itinerancy. At any rate, their literary-critical practice is best self-described as that of a post-Derridean reader rather than as rhetorical or deconstructive reading. I have let things take me where they seemed to want to go.   |  introduction

Another way of asking, as Derrida does, “what kind of thing is [lyric] poetry?” might be to inquire, not what poetry means, but what it “senses.” Can we make sense of it in other than ineffable or transcendental ways, without falling into overreading, on the one hand, or intuitionalism, on the other? Is there an undercurrent in literary-critical thinking to which this question responds? The turn from the social, the spectacle, and the commodity toward material, affective, and anthropological concerns that coincide in the recent burst of “thing theory” corresponds to a current interest in theorizing, not only the animal, but also the expressivity of the nonhuman and inanimate and the ways in which the material and technological world act on the human, as well as being acted upon by it.13 This is not simply a matter of ecotheory inflecting “green” Romanticism’s explicit concern with the environment or of political objections to an overly anthropocentric focus or even of literary theory’s fatigue with categories such as “subjectivity,” “identity,” or “agency.” Rather, a preoccupation with sense and with poetry as a form of knowing brings with it the recognition that what does not know (itself), or even lay claim to sense, can nonetheless make claims on us—can, literally, make sense. An inanimate world is not a dead world; it may indeed be what matters most when it comes to the long-term survival of human life. Things give meaning to the world; they are not merely given meaning by the uses we make of them or by the symbolic significance we attach to them in our systems of exchange. The sheer heterogeneity of things and meanings, along with the disconcerting capacity of persons to become things or of things to act like persons, forms the shifting texture of unwitting appropriation and anthropomorphism that envelops us every time we make use of a thing or a word, every time we imagine that a toy is alive or preserve an environment (let alone love, hate, or destroy it).14 Things and language may be alike in shaping psychic and social relations. But, equally, their work is not limited to constructing the unconscious, maintaining the social, or providing symbolic circuits of exchange; nor are they confined to how we understand them. Things look back at us. They may even seem to talk back.15 Rather than taking us closer to unmediated concrete or physical reality, things and words may take us—as so often in Wordsworth’s poetry—toward “a dim and undetermin’d sense / Of unknown modes of being” (Prel. 1.420–21). This as-yet-undetermined sense baffles and resists comprehension or redirects attention to the unfamiliar furniture of existence or unremarked detail that escapes any but a focused eye. These essays not only pay attention to ear and eye but also try to bring the listening ear and focused eye of attentive reading to bear on occluded experience or the gravity of things  |  

overlooked things. They also pay attention to specifically literary phenomena—to citation and translation, to (self-)portraiture, self-representation, and theories of language—as well as to the visual, aural, and tactile aspects of human experience. They tease out motifs of Romantic elegy as well as pay attention to trees, rocks, and clouds; they explore epitaphic sign-systems as well as read landscape. They are linked by lyric’s proximity to epitaph, along with the question of what it means to survive. Writing one’s own epitaph may constitute a form of privation, akin to deafness and blindness. Or it may open one’s eyes and ears to previously overlooked things. In the enigmatic Carson McCullers story from which my title comes, a newspaper boy is waylaid in a café by a derelict brooding over the long-ago loss of his wife. “I am a person who feels many things,” he tells the boy, but he had never learned how to love. After his wife leaves him, he begins to forget what she looked like. Instead, he would see other things: “a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a nickel tune in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night.” We start at the wrong end of love, he concludes, when we should begin by studying random found things or the features of the natural world: “A tree. A rock. A cloud.” This is his late-acquired habit, the knowledge that loss brings: “I graduated from one thing to another. Day by day I was getting this technique.” Perplexed by what he has been told, the newspaper boy concludes: “He sure has done a lot of traveling.”16 McCullers’s story is a Wordsworthian encounter, transposed to the world of seedy streetcar cafés: an old man traveling, his tale of distress, and the hapless paperboy in his aviator cap—puzzled by what he doesn’t understand and by the unexpected benison bestowed on him by a stranger. McCullers leaves her readers uncertain whether the old man’s progress through the world of things is the by-product of his wanderings or a slow epiphany. The essays collected here adopt the same method: graduating from one Romantic thing to another, they work on getting the technique. Chapter 1, “Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible,” pairs the poetry of John Clare with the painting of John Constable. Signifying materiality, mood, and the illusionistic expansion that characterizes baroque space, clouds also constitute one of the most elusive “materials” of Romantic lyric. Clare minutely observed the weather along with his alternating moods of elation or depression, bringing internal states into contact with early nineteenthcentury meteorological observation. Constable, the self-confessed “man of clouds,” responded to this new science of clouds by attending as an artist   |  introduction

to what he saw in the sky; his cloud studies take their place alongside what Wordsworth calls “moods of [his] own mind,” and each one captures a succession of rapidly changing phenomena. Lyric poetry and cloud studies together expand the horizon, while reminding us about the global effects of weather systems and volcanic activity in our own day. Chapter 2, “Pastoral, after History: The Apple Orchard,” takes Seamus Heaney’s translations of Rilke’s “The Apple Orchard” and “After the Fire” as examples of pastoral’s framing by historical retrospect, in this case, by Ireland’s traumatic sectarian strife. In The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s account of his visit to the poet-translator Michael Hamburger freely appropriates the older man’s childhood exile from fascist Germany. Reprising Sebald’s visit, Tacita Dean’s 2007 film focuses on Hamburger’s relation to his orchard; Hamburger’s reading of a poem in memory of another poet, Ted Hughes, reminds us how poetry is handed on from one writer to another. Sebald’s prose poem After Nature (translated by Hamburger) rewrites his own prenatal history, this time in the light of a scene of conflagration glimpsed in the background of a painting. The backward look of Benjamin’s Angel of History surveying the ruins of the past hovers over this retrospect. Pastoral is always “after” history; the meaning of the past flares up in the present, or else—as in Gerhard Richter’s Apple Trees series—deliberately banalizes and blurs it. Chapter 3, “Touching Things: ‘Nutting’ and the Standing of Trees,” reflects on the “greening” of Wordsworth in the light of Derrida’s reflections on touch and what Derrida calls “tact,” the tact not to touch, or the untouchable. Defending the legal standing of trees poses questions about the rights of inanimate things. In what ways does Wordsworth’s so-called philosophy of nature give them “standing”? A classic legal case in the history of the environmental movement can be harnessed to a rereading of Wordsworth’s injunction “with gentle hand / Touch,—for there is a Spirit in the woods” (“Nutting,” ll. 53–54). Chapter 3 explores (non-Heideggerian) ways of thinking about what does and does not have “sense,” along with philosophic speculations about animal perception whose tendency is to suggest that human subjectivity may be equally unknowable. Alice Oswald’s poem “Woods etc.” posits the unknown woods within the spirit as a counterpart to the untouchable “Spirit in the woods.” Chapter 4, “Composing Sound: The Deaf Dalesman, ‘The Brothers,’ and Epitaphic Signs,” explores the silent visual world of Wordsworth’s deaf Dalesman. David Wright—a twentieth-century nonhearing poet—brings to the fore the relation between seeing (reading) and hearing. Behind the the gravity of things  | 

figure of Wordsworth’s deaf Dalesman lie arguments about language and signs in eighteenth-century French Enlightenment writing on the deaf to which debates about the use of signing in deaf education gave rise. In Wordsworth’s “The Brothers,” communal memory is twinned with landscape via a naturalized sign-system, or “pair of diaries.” The returning sailor—disoriented by changes in the familiar landscape—is referred by the local priest to the landscape itself rather than to the unmarked graves of a country churchyard for a record of local history. The deaf-mute infant of the Immortality Ode (“That deaf and silent read’st the eternal deep”) provides a figure for Wordsworth’s persistent overreading of epitaphic signs in a context where the Lake District landscape proves as mutable as the sea. Chapter 5, “Distressful Gift: Talking to the Dead,” asks how we speak to the dead. Too personal to be published at the time, Wordsworth’s elegy “Distressful gift!” was occasioned by the drowning of his sailor brother, John. Wordsworth’s “distressful gift” refers to a notebook containing manuscript copies of his poetry for his brother to take to sea. This gift contrasts with the bargain made between them: while Wordsworth would write poetry (“working for the world”), his brother would make a living for them in the world of entrepreneurial trade. Reading Derrida’s theory of the gift alongside Wordsworth’s own practice and theory of the epitaph locates Wordsworth’s lyric “gift” outside the exchange economy; indeed, Wordsworth’s “Distressful gift!” provides the occasion for a memorial tribute to Derrida himself. Blanchotian désoeuvrement (undoing the work) links disaster to the unworldly and always incomplete work of poetry and memorialization. Chapter 6, “The Breath of Life: Wordsworth and the Gravity of Thought,” focuses on two lyrics of 1802: Wordsworth’s “These chairs they have no words to utter” and “I have thoughts that are fed by the sun.” Dorothy records how she and her brother lay side by side in a ditch, hearing their own and nature’s breathing—an experience corresponding to what D. W. Winnicott calls “the capacity to be alone.” Wordsworth’s persistent rhyming of “breath” and “death” is symptomatic of an equivocation: asleep or dead? Derrida’s last interview invokes the philosopher’s question concerning how to die. He complicates the question by asking what it means to live on, to survive. Nancy’s association of grave, gravity, and thought probes the slender margin between living and dying, while Wordsworth’s insomniac sonnets “To Sleep” parse a statement that Nancy regards as impossible: “I am asleep” (or, even, “I am dead”). For Derrida, living on entails a privative   |  introduction

form of survival: writing one’s own epitaph or being read by others. In his telling phrase, “I live my death in writing.” Chapter 7, “ ‘On the Very Brink of Vacancy’: Things Unbeseen,” explores the obscure meaning of “vacancy” in Wordsworth’s negative phenomenol­ ogy. The motif of self-portraiture links Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins to both Diderot’s Letter on the Blind and Sebald’s and the artist Jan Peter Tripp’s collaboration on the theme of eyes in Unrecounted. Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” uses the graphic image of a ruin to suggest how his sight, held captive by an image, had failed to foresee shipwreck and distress. Derrida’s representation of ruin is associated with a specular figure for the “unbeseen”—the unlooked-for representation of death in the unconscious. Diderot uses the heretical deathbed speech of a blind mathematician to confute conventional Christian ideas about Providence while arguing that the blind know as much about vision as the sighted. Sebald’s and Tripp’s binocular investigation of seeing and reading uses their unseeing (self-)portraits of eyes to suggest that, other than sidelong, through the averted eyes of a dog, we can never really see ourselves for the human thing that we are. Chapter 8, “Senseless Rocks,” relates rocks to poetry by way of sound. Besides their association with magical or Druidic writing, Wordsworth’s sounding rocks typically provoke a posture of anxious listening. In “Joanna’s Rock,” the nonhuman echoes of mountains magnify sounds that form part of the bodily experience of poetry. Elsewhere, the immobility of rocks provides a measure of time and motionlessness. Like other figures of human extremity in his poetry, Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer is stilled. Stillness— immobility and silence—provides Tacita Dean’s punning title when she memorializes John Cage in Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS, in which Cunningham reperforms Cage’s silent composition, 4′33″. Arguing that hearing and understanding are semantically linked, Nancy defines mental resonance as constitutive of subjectivity itself—just as the outside gets into the inside in The Prelude’s scenes of intent listening. The failure to internalize, by contrast, is linked to resistance to the otherness of the human as well as the nonhuman. Like the monuments and boulders that intrigue Lake District tourists, rocks mark the limits of subjectivity and readability at the margin where meaning comes and goes, whether in landscape or in lyric poetry.

the gravity of things  | 

chapter 1

Cloud Studies the visible invisible A cloud is a visible aggregate of minute particles of water suspended in the atmosphere. — Thomas Forster (1815)1 Cloud is a body without a surface but not without substance. . . . Although it has no surface, cloud is visible. — Hubert Damisch (2002)2

C

louds have always fascinated sky watchers: forming, spreading, massing, dissipating in streaks and wisps; glowing at sunrise and sunset; processing lazily or purposively across the sky. Weighty and substantial bodies of minute droplets, they mysteriously combine visibility and volume without surface. Are clouds objects? Are they phenomena? The story of the “invention” of clouds has been told by Richard Hamblyn, and the dramatic rise in the popularity of cloud-spotting suggests that they hold more than meets the eye.3 The principles of cloud formation were first understood in the early nineteenth century, when Luke Howard produced his classification of clouds as part of the embryonic science of meteorology. Driven by the turbulence of high-altitude winds and storms, bearing moisture or volcanic dust, clouds—we now know—form part of a global weather system. For artists and poets of the Romantic period, they also provided a metaphor for mobility and transformation. Shelley found in clouds a swift-moving image of constancy-in-change—“I change but I cannot die” (“The Cloud,” l. 76). But he was a scientist as well as a poet, and his cloud behavior was based on the taxonomy of Luke Howard’s early nineteenth-century Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1804).4 The sky, then, was more than a poetic workshop—it was a mobile laboratory for the study of airborne water. Clouds draw the eye upward: to movement, distance, and height, to the dynamics of space and the overarching sky. For most of us, they provoke ideas about both transcendence and inwardness. When we look up, we 10

lose ourselves. Clouds are associated with cosmology, but also with inner states. It is this combination of indeterminacy, space, and interiority that particularly interests me here. Clouds, I want to argue, make us think not only about form and vacancy, mobility and change, but also about the peculiar realm of affectivity that we call “mood.” Whether we feel uplifted or depressed, we tend to take the ups and downs of internal states for granted—so much so that we scarcely notice them. Mood is like the weather, changing and unformed, yet always with us. In classical landscape painting, weather and mood tend to converge on the drama of the sky. A cerulean sky spells calm; dark clouds indicate tempestuous events or passions. But in temperate climates, we most often experience an in-between state that is subject to subtle fluctuations of brightness and shadow, transparency and opacity. Englishness, and especially English landscape, has everything to do with changeable weather and the presence of atmospheric moisture—with updrafts and downpours, bursts of sunshine, sudden rain showers, clouds and mists. For cloud painters like Constable, this environment formed what his first biographer called “a history of his affections,” at once embodied and transient: “no two days are alike, nor even two hours.”5 It is no accident that the most detailed account of Constable’s cloud studies is by the meteorologist John Thornes.6 The object of keen meteorological observation during the Romantic period, clouds paradoxically serve to abolish the representational realm altogether. Goethe, in the series of poems inspired by his reading of Howard’s early nineteenth-century classification of clouds, wrote: “Ich muss das alles mit Augen fassen, / Will sich aber nicht recht denken lassen” (All of this I have to take in with my eyes, / But it will not let itself be grasped by thought).7 Goethe’s clouds offer a way to represent the mind to itself; however minutely or evocatively described, they evade the grasp of thought, much like the mind. The sky extends the mental sublime into the realm of clouds or thought.8 In the landscape of Kant’s sublime, nature represents the mind by analogy while also manifesting that it has a mind of its own. Wordsworth’s poetry works on us because we recognize in his cloud landscapes a representation—at once natural and transcendental—of how there is always more than the mind can grasp in nature, as well as in the imagination (just as in the Snowdon episode of The Prelude a sea of cloud usurps a real sea). Looked at from the point of view of a more recent taxonomy, clouds verge on the aesthetic of indeterminacy known as “l’informe” (a potent invention of twentieth-century modernism) and hence on chaos and shapelessness.9 They thus lend themselves to being thought about in the philosophic cloud studies  |  11

domain that the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty calls “the visible invisible.”10 Clouds are confusing, not so much because they mix elements or constantly change shape, but because they challenge the phenomenology of the visible with what cannot be seen: the luminous opacity associated with the phenomenology of sight. What Thomas Forster (the nineteenth-century cloud scientist who most directly influenced Constable) called the “nubific principle” can also be read as a principle of painting.11 Viewed as a signifier, clouds have given rise to at least one counterhistory of painting. Hubert Damisch’s study A Theory of /Cloud/ (1972) makes /cloud/ the sign of painting’s paradoxical combination of the ephemeral and the material. Above all, it signals the escape of painting from the dominance of perspective and its historical transformation; the problem of surface became the problem of illusion. By the use of two forward slashes, Damisch transforms a word denoting “cloud” in any simple descriptive, referential, or figurative sense into an index or signifier.12 Enslaved to linear perspective (so Damisch argues), painting seeks another way to represent visual experience. /Cloud/—whether rendered as the absence of sky or as deceptive trompe l’oeil—poses an alternative to the linear order. It becomes a sign of all that painting has to overcome. Instead of organizing the limits of a flat surface, the illusionistic clouds of the painted baroque cupola overflow their architectural frame. Correggio, according to Damisch, was the first to construct his pictures from the point of view of a Kantian subject for whom space is a constitutive aspect of consciousness.13 Damisch’s semiotic analysis of pictorial production takes the theme and texture of /cloud/ as an indexical case study for the development of painting; his /cloud/ becomes the defining problematic of painting from the baroque to the present day. This “pictorial” or “painterly” space—what he calls “a free and unlimited depth, considered as a luminous and aerial substance”—is opposed to a modernist emphasis on linear style, with its flatness and overlapping forms. /Cloud/ is the sign of the volume repressed by modern painting’s fixation on the flatness of the representational surface. Its semiotics challenge the insistence of twentieth-century modernism on the representation of painterly space. Clouds round out pictorial space instead of flattening it; they point to the organization of the pictorial as a dialectic of surface and depth. /Cloud/ negates solidity and shape. Nebulous and indefinite, it signals an indeterminate volume, defying the medium and restoring painting to the realm of illusionistic space. But /cloud/ also contains the paradox of form which signifies itself.14 12  |  chapter one

It may be a stretch to connect the vertiginous spaces of Correggio’s painting to Constable’s scientifically informed descriptive cloud studies, with their particularities of time, date, and weather conditions. But this connection is crucial to Damisch’s argument, and it will also inform mine. The painterly aspect of Constable’s clouds serves as a reminder that even the most local and descriptive of painters can simultaneously strive for the dynamics of abstraction. Whether inspired by the flat Suffolk landscapes of his rural childhood, where his father was a prosperous miller (and both wind and water powered the mills), or by the views from airy Hampstead Heath overlooking London, where he spent his professional life, Constable had read meteorologists such as Forster, if not his precursor, Luke Howard. His cloud studies record the formation and transformation of clouds in response to the air and wind, for which Hampstead, high above the city, provided a perfect viewing point. But like Monet’s water lilies, the series of Hampstead cloud studies that Constable painted during 1821–22 can be understood as a painter’s reflections on problems of depth, space, and form. His records of transient weather effects involve a painterly immersion, in air rather than water. Clouds are notoriously hard to draw not only because they change and move but because of their technical demands. Their challenge to graphic techniques and media, and their association with the brush, make them a theme especially suited to ink wash, watercolor, and rapid oil sketches. Cloud studies require attentiveness to subtle gradations of color and volume, along with swift, fluid, confident, and improvisatory technique. Clouds are to outline as color is to drawing: like Rothko’s fields of color, they oppose line. Cloud studies also resemble the early nineteenth-century Romantic lyric—they record the moment as a rapid or imperceptible succession of feelings and thoughts. Clouds mount, mass, tower, or darken. They provide a barometer of feeling. As Constable famously wrote in a letter to his friend and patron the Reverend John Fisher in October 1821 (the period of his Hampstead cloud studies), “painting is but another word for feeling.” In the same letter, he added that the sky is not “a ‘White Sheet’ drawn behind the Objects” (like the backdrop to a painted scene) but rather “the ‘key note’—the standard of ‘Scale’ and the chief ‘Organ of Sentiment.’”15 Clouds, for Constable, were a source of feeling and perception, an “Organ of Sentiment” (like the heart or lungs) as much as meteorological phenomena. If painting is another name for feeling, and the sky an organ of sentiment, then his cloud studies are less a notation of changing weather effects than a series of Romantic lyrics: exhalations and exclamations, meditations and reflections, cloud studies  |  13

loosely attached to a specific location or moment in time. Constable’s skies may sometimes lend themselves to allegory, as in the rain cloud and rainbow over Salisbury Cathedral or the storm clouds that lower dramatically over Old Sarum.16 But more often, they evoke fleeting states of mind, feeling, and atmosphere. As they mount or move across the sky, they become a language for inner activity: darkening here, lightening there, here an ascent, there a fraying or an accumulation of intensity; a passage of calm before a storm or a glimpse of cerulean sky. Constable’s cloud studies express states of mind that are elusive and transient, yet their movement and rhythm evoke the familiar play of light and shadow across a landscape. Clouds have a directional tendency, traveling on what are, incongruously, known to meteorologists as “streets,” as if they were traffic. Constable’s cloud studies catch something as indefinable yet ever present as our own internal weather—tendency and mobility. How better to register the constantly shifting relation between perception and feeling, embodied consciousness and underlying emotional states? The sky, then, functions both as an organ of sentiment and as a form of nonreferential free association—as both visibility and invisibility, form and l’informe—but above all as a mode of perception. But clouds also carry a material freight along with their aesthetic and emotional connotations. We should not lose sight of the great nineteenth-century changes—at once scientific and industrial—that formed clouds as we know them. Before coming back to Constable, I want to turn to his early nineteenth-century contemporary: the Northamptonshire laborer-poet, John Clare—famous for his poetry of detailed natural observation, for his madness, and for his long confinement in mental institutions. Clare, I want to suggest, not only observed nature minutely but also saw more than he knew, and perhaps knew more than he could actually see. This is especially evident when it comes to Clare’s clouds.

“Under a Cloud” & we often see clouds which we identify by their curling up from the orison in separate masses as gass clouds which ascend into the middle sky & then join the quiet journey [of the] clouds & are lost in the same colour. — John Clare, Northborough (October/November 1841)17

John Clare, adrift on a cloud journey, also experienced his depressions as being “under a cloud.”18 In what is probably his most famous poem, the 14  |  chapter one

anguished “I am” of 1844, he describes himself as “like vapours tost / . . . Into the living sea of waking dreams” (ll. 6–8).19 A near contemporary of the contrastingly upwardly mobile and professionally successful Constable, Clare shared with him an acute attunement to changing weather and seasons—so much so that his depressions were apparently exacerbated in spring and autumn by seasonal affective disorder (SAD).20 His poetry links the Romantic period, with its impulse toward natural description and its evocation of inner states, to the realism of the high Victorian age, with its scientific impulse and its emphasis on the individual’s relation to society. His exquisite sensitivity to the sights and sounds of rural England—birds and their nests, the changing seasons, rural pursuits and occasions— reflects a twofold taxonomic impulse. Recording natural phenomena such as weather variations formed part of a growing movement to catalog the environment that engaged professional, amateur, and local naturalists during the early nineteenth century.21 But Clare’s poetry also responds to the fact that the countryside itself was undergoing rapid change under the pressures of nineteenth-century agricultural capitalism, enclosure, and urbanization, as poorly paid agricultural laborers migrated to the new industrial and commercial centers. By the 1840s, the rural idyll had already become a nostalgic past for many urban immigrants, and even for agricultural workers like Clare who remained on the land. Clare can be read as a social observer despite himself, as well as a close observer of the natural phenomena of early nineteenth-century rural England—recording what John Barrell has called “the dark side of the landscape.”22 But (as Barrell has argued elsewhere) enclosure does not entirely explain Clare’s alienated vision or his myopic and self-protective focus.23 Clare lived on the margins of a London literary world that brought him notoriety and sales but that, exposing him to the fluctuations of literary taste, ultimately failed to provide his family with a steady income.24 His early volumes—Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827), and The Rural Muse (1835)—established him in the tradition of self-taught “ploughman” poets such as Robert Burns and Robert Bloomfield (a poet illustrated by Constable). But these rural poets had become much less fashionable by the 1830s, the period that coincided with Clare’s increasing destitution and depression. Arguably, both he and his poetry had already become an anachronism, awaiting discovery by twentieth-century writers such as Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, and Iain Sinclair, for whom he became a poet’s poet and naturalist, as well as a protoenvironmentalist. Economic circumstances cloud studies  |  15

(not just bad weather) may have exacerbated both Clare’s illness and his fixation on Lord Byron, the aristocratic outsider and alter ego whose Childe Harold and Don Juan Clare hectically rewrote in 1841, the year of his flight from Dr. Allen’s asylum in Essex. Clare’s acute sensitivity to his surroundings—Northamptonshire’s hedge­ rows, fields, flowers, and birds—included England’s moist climate and changeable skies. Weather is necessarily an object of minute observation to anyone who works on the land. He too may have known Forster’s book, given his observations on atmospheric phenomena.25 But Clare, no less than Constable, uses weather as an internal barometer to register minute shifts in mood and feeling for which he had no other language and for which the trappings of Byronic melancholy provided a clumsy, ventriloquized substitute. Observing nature offered the resources of a finely calibrated vocabulary quite unlike the Byronic rhetoric of Clare’s Child Harold, with its “Hues of Hopeless Agony,” or the colorful Regency shorthand—“blue devils” and “black melancholy”—by which Clare’s letters refer to his depressions.26 The language of journeying clouds provided an alternative means to record precarious emotional states and minute interior changes, via his rural surroundings. The alternation of sun and shower, settling and flight (typically the nesting and alarmed flight of birds), underpin the recurrent rhythms of Clare’s poetry. His perspective is pedestrian: that of someone looking down as he walks, then skyward: “The grass below—above the vaulted sky” (“I am,” l.18). But as John Barrell suggests, his penchant for minute particularity was also a drawback, functioning as a defense against other forms of encroachment from outside: “[Clare] is happy to look into the distance only if it is empty, if there is nothing there; and if there is a thing there, it destroys for Clare the illusion of space and depth, because it makes him want to examine it, in its particularity and detail, and thus he focuses on it too sharply.”27 Barrell’s perceptive comment suggests how the sky’s emptiness provided a temporary refuge from Clare’s characteristically obsessive detail and closeup seeing. This is what another poet, John Ashbery, in “For John Clare,” calls “The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind” (a “Clabbered sky”). Space and depth are impinged upon, and closeness and expansion are in tension: “There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it. . . . There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out.”28 The so-much-to-be-seen is altogether too much. Clare is anything but pedestrian, although his “journey out of Essex” in 1841—an escape from one asylum, before his twenty-two-year reincarceration in another—forms the defining journey of his life.29 The posture I want 16  |  chapter one

to explore, however, is not that of the pedestrian poet (feet and eyes on the ground) whose gift for observation places him, like Constable, in the tradition of natural-history writers such as Gilbert White of Selborne. Rather, I want to catch Clare flat on his back, looking up at the sky and the clouds. In 1841, temporarily free from the asylum, Clare wrote that whereas closecropped grass made him melancholy, “pieces of greensward . . . smooth & green as a bowling green” made him as happy as if he was “rambling in Paradise.”30 In “The Meadow Grass,” written ten years previously, he takes a break—a joyous, ecstatic rest—in the month of May: “I have no power / To tell the joys I feel & see” (ll. 3–4).31 It is springtime, and what he feels and sees are grassy meadows, “So sunny level & so green.” The grass is “waving ancle high,” inviting him to “drop [him] down / & feel delight to be alone” (ll. 6–7, 9–10). But the downward drop (like that of a lark plummeting to its nest) is also an updraft. He is simultaneously borne up by his own skyward look, raised out of himself by joy that is “half a stranger” to him. We experience, with Clare, a preternaturally bright side of the landscape—a buoyancy that nonetheless contains wistful undertones: That happy sky with here & there A little cloud that would express By the slow motions that they wear They live with peace & quietness I think so as I see them glide Thoughts earthly tumult cant destroy So calm so soft so smooth they ride Im sure their errands must be joy (ll. 17–24) The grammatical non sequitur (“They live with peace & quietness . . . Thoughts earthly tumult cant destroy”) suggests a cloudscape impervious to the tumult that beset Clare at other times and in darker moods. The sky is the upswing; it implies the alternating rhythms, not of pedestrianism, but of elation and depression: “The sky is all serene & mild” (l. 25). The syntactical movement of this stanza, with its nebulous lack of grammatical clarity, forms a correlative to the slow movement and transformation of a cloud-traveled sky. As Clare writes, “Theres something more to fill the mind / Then words can paint to ears & eyes” (ll. 65–66). Notice the absence of sharply observed detail. Here there is no obsessive seeing or persecutory being seen; as Adam Phillips acutely observes, apropos of this persecution by sight: “ John Clare has been celebrated as a poet who celebrates the cloud studies  |  17

pleasures of observation, but his poetry is equally alert to the terrors of being seen.”32 The sky provides a relief from seeing and from being seen, as well as a language for undirected states of thought and feeling. Clouds may move in “streets,” but they do not flee or pursue as Clare himself fled or felt himself pursued along the rural roads of Essex and Northamptonshire. This space is “Entirely out of troubles way” (l. 38), and “Strife comes but in the songs / Of birds half frantic in their glee” (ll. 33–34). The light “Seems more than any common scene”—unreal and transfiguring, like Wordsworth’s “light that never was, on sea or land” (“Elegiac Stanzas,” l. 15). Clare’s vision of a “nature” (Nature) that is luxuriant and self-delighting—“Left to herself & solitude” (l. 46)—personifies his own temporarily unregarded, unregarding (and ungendered) state. Nature lacks the troubling consciousness that disturbs the scene, as distinct from the poet’s own persecutory or obsessive thoughts. The intruder here is the alienating aspect of consciousness that haunts Clare’s poetry: striving, care-ridden, manifested by the burden of too much seeing, too much wanting. We might call it the compulsion to observe: “I seem myself the only one / Intruding on her happy mood” (ll. 47–48). Observing, noticing, looking, all characterize this overalert and intrusive self-consciousness. More relaxed and longsighted forms of observation are made temporarily possible by states of mind—calm rather than agitated— that contrast with the bipolar opposite of a “clouded mind”: I feel so calm I seem to find A world I never felt before & heaven fills my clouded mind As though it would be dull no more An endless sunshine glows around A meadow like a waveless sea Glows green in many a level ground A very paradise to me (ll. 73–80) Here the clouds that “live with peace & quietness” relieve a mind rendered “dull” (“depressed,” as we would say today) by the weather that the poem allows us to glimpse as the dark side of Clare’s cloud-filled internal landscape. Clare’s clouds can also approach the “nubific” sublime. Another poem of the same period, “ A Beautiful Sunset in November,” rivals the sunsets of 18  |  chapter one

his contemporary, Constable, for whom they were similarly freighted with emotional and atmospheric meanings: Behind the distant spire the sun Sinks beautiful—& rolled In smoky folds cloud-mountains run All edged with peaks of gold & now an orange splendour comes & looses all the blue Again a grove of roses bloom & splendid is the view Now crimson lines awhile remain & cut new mountains high They leave us when we look again & all is like the sky Yes that red bar that stretched for miles & through such splendid crowds Of hills is gone like favours smiles & turned to common clouds33 The closing stanza has a dying fall, beyond mere disappointment or the cliché of habitual disillusion. “Common clouds”—clouds that are no longer cloud-mountains, peaks of gold, blooming like roses, crimson and splendid—belong to a world that fades into the light of common day. Or, as Clare wrote while suffering from a “confounded lethargy of low spirits,” depression “at times makes me feel as if my senses had a mind to leave me.”34 This is how clouds appear when sunset fades. It is like being abandoned by one’s senses. The brilliance of Clare’s sunset testifies, unexpectedly, to the materiality of cloud phenomena. A crimson sunset is the agricultural worker’s weather forecast. But his first stanza contains an interesting word: “smoky” (“& rolled / In smoky folds cloud-mountains run”). Atmospheric pollution has a distinct effect on the color of the sunset. For a countryman during the 1820s and 1830s, urban and industrial air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels would have been much less visible than for later Victorian artists and writers like Dickens and Whistler, who dramatized London’s dense fogs or celebrated smoky sunsets over the Thames. But as the meteorologist John Thornes has shown, the first half of the nineteenth century had seen cloud studies  |  19

an intensification of sunset colors from a natural pollutant: volcanic dust. It has been argued that Turner’s spectacular sunsets were affected by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia during 1815.35 Volcanic eruptions, including three eruptions of Vesuvius between 1810 and 1820 and eruptions in the West Indies, the Azores, and elsewhere in the world (ten eruptions in two decades), led to the lurid sunsets recorded in and around London during the early decades of the nineteenth century—recently replicated by the effects of Icelandic volcanic ash. A particularly brilliant autumn sunset painted by Constable in 1812 has been adduced as evidence of the effects of volcanic dust clouds that had circulated halfway around the world.36 Nothing makes it clearer that we live in a global climate system. Clare may even have known—as Constable almost certainly did, since the effects of volcanic eruptions were well documented at the time—that his rural skies were colored by volcanic dust. Manic-depressive rhythms and atmospheric pollution converge in the baroque folds of Clare’s clouds. His poetry allows us to glimpse not only a rural idyll already in the process of erosion but the start of a much longer journey from one kind of landscape—or skyscape—to another: that of twentiethcentury environmental protest over carbon emissions and air pollution. Iain Sinclair, walking the route of Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex,” follows a map that is disfigured by modern motorways and bypasses and made noisy by thundering lorries—its streams polluted, its tracks and paths blocked by the obstacles of modern transportation systems and industrialized agriculture.37 Not only does Clare return to us today as a poet persecuted by the so(too-)much-to-be-seen, by the effects of rural enclosure and urbanization, and by the changing economics of the nineteenth-century book trade. But we also, of necessity, read him in the wake of the twentieth-century transport revolution, with all its unforeseen effects on the landscape, its carbon emissions, and its motorways and airport runways.

“The Man of Clouds” You can never be nubilous—I am the man of clouds. —Constable to John Fisher (November 1823)38

John Ruskin, in Modern Painters (1856), suggests that if a name were needed to characterize modern (by which he means nineteenth-century) landscape painting, it would be “the service of clouds.” Ruskin’s disquisition on “cloud beauty” is partly mystical—“Between the heaven and man came the cloud. 20  |  chapter one

His life being partly as the falling leaf and partly as the flying vapour”—but he also offers a meditation on the mysterious aspects of cloud phenomena.39 At once material and immaterial, Ruskinian clouds have a way of “mixing something and nothing” that for him requires explanation.40 The atmosphere (transparent or opaque, blue when rain is imminent) causes him to question the nature of air itself, about which we know nothing. Is it water that makes the air blue? Why are the farthest clouds the most crimson?41 Lacking knowledge of the great cloud systems that encircle the globe, he sees them as ineffable: “lastly, all these questions respecting substance, and aspect, and shape, and line, and division, are involved with others as inscrutable, concerning action. The curves in which clouds move are unknown:—nay, the very method of their motion, or apparent motion, how far it is by change of place, how far by appearances in one place and vanishing from another.”42 Clouds have to do with both scientific speculation and mystery; but—as for Goethe before him—they tend to make Ruskin’s mind spread away into the stratosphere of visionary prose. Ruskin’s addiction to line and design, however, runs contrary to the very indeterminacy of cloud formations about which he himself speculates in these exalted terms. Words provide him with a better medium than line. Paradoxically, his prose in Modern Painters is dedicated both to the taxonomy of clouds and to the difficulty of defining them. There may be only two species—massive and striated—but in the same breath Ruskin suggests (in an embellished cliché) that clouds are literally “fleecy”: “The fleece may be so bright as to look like flying thistle-down, or so diffused as to show no visible outline at all. Still if it is all of one common texture, like a handful of wool, or a wreath of smoke, I call it massive.”43 Ruskin records his observation of smoke-polluted London, where two out of three sunrises are now obscured, then obsessively counts the ranks of cirrus on a purple ground: “the average number was 60 in each row, rather more than less.” He gives us an illustration.44 But what follows is figurative in a different sense: “Flocks of Admetus under Apollo’s keeping”; Apollo, banished from heaven, tended the flocks of Admetus.45 Clouds are like sheep, or else skilled mechanical workers—lace makers, spinners, or embroiderers: “Busy workers they must be, that twine the braiding of them all to the horizon”; “Looped lace as it were, richest point—invisible threads fastening embroidered cloud to cloud.”46 Ruskin’s metaphors are laboriously spun from the technologies of nineteenth-century industrial production. The industrial arts enter in the form of a footnote in which Ruskin attacks the use of the brush in sketching clouds, insisting that “a dark pencil, which cloud studies  |  21

will lay shade with its side and draw lines with its point, is the best instrument.” The translation of pencil sketches into something more permanent involves either delicate and expensive engraving or “the finer and un-cloudlike touches of the pen.”47 This is Benjamin’s work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The most powerful cloud painter for Ruskin was, of course, not Constable, but Turner—“this power,” he says, “coming from his constant habit of drawing skies, like everything else, with the pencil point.”48 Ruskin gives his readers the embroidered sublime (embroidered with his own pen, along with his interest in modern engraving technology). The illustrated cloudscapes of Modern Painters are typically Alpine, with peaks and castles, rather than trees or horizons, giving the measure of their vertiginous height. Ruskin’s clouds are “cloud-chariots” or else “The Angel of the Sea,” driven by the power of dreams, roiling like airborne oceans—visionary “messengers of fate” or a tumultuous accompaniment to momentous events. Yet they are simultaneously imbued with the values of an industrial age: not just the steam, speed, and heat that fascinated Ruskin when it came to Turner—“Turnerian Light” and “Turnerian Mystery”—but the techniques of Victorian engraving and engineering. Ruskin’s claustrophobic clouds are designer-clouds, as schematic as designs for iron bridges. What interests him is the fixity and linear architecture of cloud construction. It is hard to tell girders from clouds (figs. 1.1–1.2). Constable’s cloud studies belong to an alternative tradition and draw on quite different techniques. Looking back to the huge skies of Dutch landscape painting, his paintings are also inflected by the great artists of the past (Titian, Salvator, Claude) while simultaneously imbued with a Romantic aesthetic of direct observation from nature.49 These strands combine a classical approach to landscape, where visual pictorialism is linked to pastoral, and a Romantic individualism that emphasizes the artist’s subjective feelings; truth lies both in the universality of landscape and in the artist’s spontaneous firsthand seeing.50 But Constable too can be seen as a modern painter (although not by Ruskin), shaped by an early nineteenth-century emphasis on scientific observation. Not only did he meticulously record the work scenes and water mechanics of the Stour Valley, from which his family earned their prosperity, but he was also a protoscientist who made “Obtrusive” skies the “keynote” of his paintings, backing up his keen interest in weather effects with studies in nineteenth-century meteorology.51 We know, for instance, that Constable read and annotated the second edition of Thomas Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena (1815), a popularization and extension of Luke Howard’s 1804 Essay on the Modification of Clouds.52 This is 22  |  chapter one

figure 1.1. John Ruskin, “Cloud Perspective: Rectilinear,” from Modern Painters, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–8), vol. 7, plate 64. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library.

figure 1.2. John Ruskin, “Cloud Perspective: Curvilinear,” from Modern Painters, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–8), vol. 7, plate 65. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library.

the “nubilous” Constable, or self-professed “man of clouds.”53 In addition, he may well have read Howard’s collection of meteorological data in The Climate of London (1818–20), published just before the period of his intensive Hampstead cloud sketches of 1821–22, with their careful meteorological annotations.54 Constable’s interest in composition and his refusal to make his sky simply “a ‘White sheet’ drawn behind the Objects” both speak, in a different sense, to the materiality of his clouds—to their compositional role in the landscape paintings by which he made his living. As Constable wrote, clouds were “a very material part of [his] composition.”55 Clouds are at once a form of scientific “matter” and the material of painting. Both for the scientific observer and for the painter, clouds pose particular kinds of problem. As Forster notes, they are capable of becoming lighter and darker according to their relation to the sun (the light source for a landscape artist), and they may be operated on by “the nubific principle” (thought by many to be an electrical principle).56 For Kurt Badt, a pioneering writer on Constable’s clouds, Howard’s taxonomy provided the basis for what Goethe had called “limiting the indefinite, the unstable and the unattainable.”57 Cloud classification attempted to limit the indefiniteness and instability of the sky by means of a scientific regime, or taxonomy, much as Ruskin had attempted by means of metaphor and line. This regime was at once material and aesthetic. Clouds are not solid but they are (literally) heavy, owing to their water content. For the painter they are both visible and threedimensional, forming a system of depth and movement, light and shadow, illusion and perspective. The depiction of clouds requires sophisticated solutions to problems involving the representation of space and volume along with the technical skill to capture transient effects, whether in finished landscape paintings or in studies for future paintings. Constable preferred clouds in motion, on windy days, as his meticulous annotations of his Hampstead cloud studies of 1821–22 reveal. But he was not simply writing a cloud journal for his own artistic purposes. Perhaps there is another way to think about the tension between competing views of Constable’s art (at once universal and particular; classical and Romantic; scientific and subjective). For Constable himself, his cloud studies formed part of a global skyscape. Even temperate skies were lined with the sublime. Constable drew a line in the margin of his copy of the second edition of Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena opposite Forster’s prefatory remark that whereas the botanist and naturalist must confine their observations to specific habitats, the meteorologist takes the entire world as habitat—a form of the meteorological sublime. Here is Forster: cloud studies  |  25

But on the barren mountain’s rugged vortex, in the uniform gloom of the desert, or on the trackless surface of the ocean, we may view the interesting electrical operations which are going on above, manifested in the formation and changes of the clouds, which bear water in huge masses from place to place, or throw it down in torrents on the earth and waters; occasionally creating whirlwinds and water spouts; or producing the brilliant phaenomena of meteors and of lightning; and constantly ornamenting the sky with the picturesque imagery of coloured clouds and golden haze. The atmosphere and its phaenomena are everywhere, and thunder rolls, and rainbows glitter in all conceivable situations, and we may view them whether it may be our lot to dwell in the frozen countries of polar ice, in the mild climates of the temperate zone, or in the parched regions which lay more immediately under the path of the sun.58 At first reading, Forster’s reflection evokes Turner’s visionary landscapes rather than Constable’s windy Hampstead or the working rivers of the Stour. But I think there is a rationale to be found in Constable’s marginal mark. The specificity—the temporality and locality—emphasized by his cloud studies is part of a larger atmospheric picture in which the temperate zone is linked to the tropics. Water-bearing clouds are aspects of a global climatic system, just as regional effects form part of a larger weather map. The artist’s eye may be on the clouds of Hampstead or the windy skies of Suffolk, but cloud formations are distributed across the globe: “The atmosphere and its phaenomena are everywhere.” “What a glorious morning is this for clouds,” wrote Constable in 1833 to the London bookseller from whom he probably acquired Forster’s work.59 Whether or not his interest in clouds was inflected by his meteorological studies, Constable’s cloud sketches of 1821–22 are usually annotated as if they were scientific journal entries, in the manner of Howard’s data on the climate of London: “Septr 24th . . . 10 o’clock morning wind S.W. warm & fine till afternoon, when it rained and wind got more to the north” (fig. 1.3).60 “Noon 27 Sept very bright after rain wind West” (fig. 1.4).61 “Sep. 28 1821 Noon—looking North West windy from the S.W. large bright clouds flying rather fast very stormy night followed” (fig. 1.5).62 Constable customarily records, as a minimum, the details of time, date, and wind direction and often includes specific aspects of cloud behavior or weather. Sometimes he also records the temperature or the color of the sky, along with a brief comment on the overall aesthetic effect (“fine and grand”). The aesthetics of clouds, however, are inseparable from the range and tonality of their color, perspec26  |  chapter one

figure 1.3. John Constable, Study of Sky and Trees, 24 September 1821. Oil on paper. Photo © VA Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

tive, direction, and mass. Beyond developing his expertise and providing the raw material for larger landscape studies—the ambitious six-footers for the Royal Academy from which he made his reputation and his living—what did Constable, as an artist rather than a scientist, find so fascinating about clouds? Could it be that what drew Constable to clouds was not so much rapidly changing weather effects or the representation of objects in space (clouds, or even /clouds/) but a representation of internal states? Constable’s cloud studies are replete rather than vacant. One thinks, without discomfort, of Ashbery’s “feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind.”63 Unlike Clare’s, Constable’s sky is like a mind filled with its thoughts—a mind in contact with itself through what it sees. In his Cloud Study of 28 September 1821, four birds in a windy sky, with just a band of blue at the foot cloud studies  |  27

figure 1.4. John Constable, Cloud Study: Horizon of Trees, 27 September 1821. Oil on paper laid on board, red ground. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

of the paper, create a sense of windy height and tumbling movement (stratocumulus); yet the sky is anchored securely to the ground by the horizon line. Elsewhere, in a Cloud Study belonging to the following year, subtle gradations of light and dark offer a vista of massing clouds (cumulus), dramatically backlit, obscuring the sky and foretelling rain; yet the drama is confronted head on, without dismay (fig. 1.6). Fair weather (cumulus) creates a fine display as “streets” of baroque clouds process on an easterly airstream in a high, exquisitely colored sky; their movement is quietly purposive, a record of successive discrete episodes (fig. 1.7). In all these sketches, what is striking is Constable’s use of space and volume—piling up, depth, and the effect of movement—along with differentiated or combined effects of light and heavy (what Ruskin distinguishes as “fleecy” and “massive”). Unexpectedly, 28  |  chapter one

figure 1.5. John Constable, Cloud Study, 28 September 1821. Oil on paper laid on board. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/ Bridgeman Art Library.

since these are cloud studies, Constable appears to be interested in weight, as well as in volume, directionality, and three-dimensional depth; his silver clouds often have a leaden lining. “Heavy clouds” (rain-bearing clouds) produce weighty effects: high pressure, on the other hand, produces a sense of lightness and buoyancy. Communicating weather-related moods, as well as describing cloud phenomena, Constable’s cloud studies resemble what Wordsworth called “Moods of [his] own mind”: lyrics lightly tied to the specificity of their occasion—the fleeting thoughts or emotions of the moment, or the hour, spent out of doors, arising spontaneously in response to the effects of weather or season. Constable’s clouds, read as a sequence, represent the continuous passage of moods, thoughts, and feelings as they cloud studies  |  29

figure 1.6. John Constable, Cloud Study, 27 August 1822. Oil on paper relaid on board. Courtesy of Tate Gallery, London.

follow one another through the mind. His cloud studies are the equivalent of lyric poems, and cloud forms are his stanzas. Constable never delivered his planned lectures on the science of painting the sky, and his “observations on skies and clouds” have not survived.64 But in his lectures on landscape, he argued that landscape painting “is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.” He continues: “Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.”65 Constable was a philosopher in the sense of being interested in the forms of knowledge associated with perception. In another lecture, on Dutch landscape painting, he wrote, “We see nothing truly till we understand it,” quoting George Crabbe’s 30  |  chapter one

figure 1.7. John Constable, Study of Cumulus Clouds, 21 September 1822. Oil on paper laid on panel. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/ Bridgeman Art Library.

lines: “It is the Soul that sees; the outward eyes / Present the object, but the Mind descries.”66 This famous citation suggests that Constable had more in mind than meteorology—that for him, seeing was a mode of cognition (“the Mind descries”). Where Wordsworth—who can be descriptive too— tends to lose himself and landscape in an inward look (seeing into the life of things), Constable’s is always an embodied consciousness, firmly rooted in space and time. In his painting, perception is seldom transcendental, although it may be dramatic and even allegorical. Observing and understanding the sky relate to its function as an “organ of Sentiment,” a palpating organ that makes landscapes live and breathe. This is what “observation” meant to him. Here Constable has something in common with the twentieth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose unfinished and posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible (1964) inspired both Lacan and Derrida to reflect on vision as a form of understanding (or, in Lacan’s case, misunderstanding). I want to turn to Merleau-Ponty in closing, as a way to address the philosophy of clouds. cloud studies  |  31

“Space Which the Heart Feels” The space of modern painting is “space which the heart feels,” space in which we too are located, space which is close to us and with which we are organically connected. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (1948)67

Merleau-Ponty insists that “at the horizon of all these visions or quasi-visions it is the world itself I inhabit, the natural world and the historical world”; it is, he continues, “as if my vision of the world itself were formed from a certain point of the world.”68 We know what we know from the evidence of sight and touch. We are always embodied in the world we see and feel. The Visible and the Invisible sets out to define the folded, chiastic nature of this dual mode of perception. What Merleau-Ponty means by the invisible is not a transcendental or mystical realm but rather the point at which we are linked to the world by what we cannot perceive: ourselves in the act of perception. The body perceives, yet effaces itself in perceiving. The analogy he invokes is that of the blind spot in the eye marking the place where the eye is linked to the optic nerve, what he calls the punctum caecum of consciousness.69 Philosophy is distinct from a conception of objective science, MerleauPonty argues, since philosophers believe themselves to be implicated in the questions asked. The physicist who is self-situated physically, as an observer, and the psychologist who self-situates in the sociohistorical world have both abandoned the idea of an absolute knowledge: they are part of the world they observe and in which they live. In the same way, Merleau-Ponty insists, philosophers “enjoin a radical examination of our belongingness to the world before science.” And again, “Our eyes are no longer the subjects of vision; they have joined the numbers of things seen.”70 In a lucid account of his ideas delivered in lectures on the radio during the late 1940s, MerleauPonty contrasts the peaceful world of classical perspective that stretches to infinity—Poussin’s world, for instance—with the successive snapshots of perception that, in his words, seek to “recapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the landscape. They have been reluctant to settle for an analytical overview and have striven to recapture the feel of perceptual experience itself.”71 Merleau-Ponty’s subject here is space, and the painter he has in mind is Cézanne. This space of modern painting, he notes (quoting Jean Paulhan), is no longer that of the absolute observer but “space which the heart feels”—that is, “space in which we too are located” and to which we are closely and organically connected by our sensory perception.72 32  |  chapter one

Merleau-Ponty identifies philosophy with “a disclosure of the ‘unknown,’” which is “the attitude of reflection at its best.”73 What interests him is the passage from perception to reflection or thought: “With the conversion to reflection, perceiving and imagining are now only two modes of thinking.”74 Embodied perception has the potential to become a mode of thinking, as well as a mode of identity: “I am a knowing”—his pregnant phrase—replaces the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.” Being is the basis for knowing rather than thinking providing the basis for being.75 Like Merleau-Ponty, and in marked contrast to Clare’s alienated “I am,” Constable too offers us a mode of knowing that is related and shared. Such knowing involves what Merleau-Ponty defines as “the intertwining of my life with the other lives, of my body with the visible things, by the intersection of my perceptual field with that of the others.”76 Unlike Clare, who persistently finds his commonality with birds and animals rather than with people, Constable is a sociable painter, even when his subject is a sky altogether emptied of human presence. The small figures that set off his rural landscapes with their flecks of red, like so many punctuation marks, are the inscription of this sociability—and of visibility itself. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “A punctuation in the field of red things,” connecting with other reds and with “the field of red garments,” is also “a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility.”77 In Constable, the obsessive close-up of Clare’s seeing becomes expansive, while insisting (in Merleau-Ponty’s words) “that our relationship to space is not that of a pure disembodied subject to a distant object but rather that of a being which dwells in space relating to its natural habitat.”78 The natural habitat of the human is relational and social; it contains other lives—working or at rest, reaping, sleeping, or leaping. For Merleau-Ponty, the look “envelopes, palpates, espouses the visible things.”79 That enveloping palpation of the visible world by the eye (or, for the artist, by light) constitutes not only an essential aspect of cloud painting but its underlying figurative meaning. Clouds are untouchable; yet (like the eye) they envelop and palpate the visible sky, creating depth and feeling. We cannot experience the thickness of a cloud and see it at the same time; once in a cloud, we have lost sight of it. Clouds puzzle us by representing, not so much the mind in a state of reflection, as the latency involved in all visible representation—not fullness versus flatness only (as Damisch argues), but absence—the ungraspable or unattainable; things we cannot see, as well as things visible to the eye. Clouds provide a metaphor for what Merleau-Ponty calls an element or incarnate principle (like water, air, earth, fire) “midway cloud studies  |  33

between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.”80 This is his description of the embodied being, or flesh, that occupies the speculative last chapter of The Visible and the Invisible (“The Intertwining—the Chiasmus”). Central to this concept of embodied seeing is the idea of a shared landscape. One’s own landscape exists in the knowledge that there are other landscapes—hence, what he calls the “intercorporeality” of vision. Such an idea contests the notion of an isolated or purely subjective and private vision, sometimes thought of as synonymous with Romanticism. When I speak of a landscape to another, writes Merleau-Ponty, “this individual green of the meadow under my eyes invades his vision without quitting my own. I recognize in my green his green.”81 He might have been writing with Constable’s green in mind—or even Clare’s. But where Clare’s meadow is his own (recovered or lost) paradis vert, emptied of others and of the complexities of adult relations and sexuality, Constable’s companionable vision locates us in the same space as the artist, both a working space and the space of sociability. Yet as Merleau-Ponty notes, abandoning Cartesian models also makes room for the nonnormativity that he calls “knowledge of the natural world riddled with gaps, which is how poetry creeps in.”82 Clare—along with Cézanne—also occupies that gap-riddled, poetry-filled natural world. Merleau-Ponty’s definition of vision has provided the starting point for discussions by philosophers and theorists as different as Lacan, on the one hand, whose 1964 seminars on the Gaze argue with Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, and, on the other, Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind (1991) meditates on the relation of seeing to blindness and of vision to touch, singling out as a key passage Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of the glove turned inside out: “But what is proper to the visible is . . . to be the surface of an inexhaustible depth: this is what makes it able to be open to visions other than our own. . . . For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes.”83 The fascination of Constable’s cloud painting, I suggest, is that it represents the surface of this inexhaustible depth as Constable saw it, “turned inside out under [his] own eyes.” In so doing, it preempts the denigration of vision that has often been considered endemic in twentieth-century French thought.84 Constable’s cloud studies allow us to see ourselves turned inside out under our own eyes, interiority revealed in and through its (un)seeing. Clouds are the realm of the visible invisible, both what we can see and what we cannot; their representation involves the double relation of the work of perception and the work of art, along with our complex, subjective, yet always predetermined relation to both. 34  |  chapter one

For Merleau-Ponty, in the last resort, the work of art resembles the object of perception in that it represents “a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free . . . but bound, a prisoner of all the signs, or details, which reveal it to me.”85 This tension between the inexhaustible and the bound, between revelation and signs, lies at the heart of the distinct forms of seeing that are so differently articulated in Clare’s poetry and Constable’s painting: under a cloud with Clare or drawn to the clouds with Constable, the nubilous man of clouds.

cloud studies  |  35

chapter 2

Pastoral, after History the apple orchard Remembrance, after all, in essence is nothing other than a quotation. — W. G. Sebald, Unrecounted1 To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation. — Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project 2

P

astoral—since its structure is always retrospective—engages questions of history: what is irremediably past. Seamus Heaney’s collection District and Circle (2006) includes two poems translated from Rilke, “The Apple Orchard” and “ After the Fire.” They occupy a hinterland between translation and memory, pastoral and the scorch marks of sectarian strife: a landscape from which history is only superficially absent and in which pastoral—after nature, hence already culture—marks a site of buried or smoldering destruction. Translation becomes a mode of historical articulation as well as a form of memory. In Benjamin’s words, writing history “belongs to the concept of citation.”3 The orchard is an enduring symbol of pastoral cultivation. Tended or aged, pruned or neglected, it yields fruit and genealogies, at once pomological and literary. Rilke’s apple trees speak to Heaney, a poet of the rural landscape who digs into the violence beneath the rural surface. The orchard surfaces elsewhere, in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) and in Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007), a combined tribute to Sebald and to the poet and translator Michael Hamburger. Sebald’s fictionally mediated relation to Hamburger—the posthumous translator of his poem After Nature (1988)—is recorded in The Rings of Saturn, where Hamburger’s orchard and autobiographical memoir are interwoven with Sebald’s hybrid, quasi-fictionalized narrative. Despite their generational difference, the two are linked by their exile, whether forced or voluntary. A decade older than Sebald, Hamburger was a childhood refugee from 1930s Nazi Germany; Sebald left a Germany whose World War II history immediately predated his birth, moving to England in the 1960s. The poet-translator’s memories 36

stand in for Sebald’s own unremembered and unrecounted prenatal past. Uncovering the traumatic devastation of World War II, Sebald’s “Air War and Literature,” included in On The Natural History of Destruction (1999), focuses on the collectively disavowed memory of the aerial destruction of German cities (Hamburg, Nürnberg, Dresden) around the time of his own conception and birth. These unowned memories were later revisited by Hamburger himself in his role as the translator of Sebald’s After Nature. The history of war and the history of translation are intertwined. This dense layering of memorial and reciprocal citation is recaptured at one remove in Tacita Dean’s film: we see Hamburger at his desk, reading a poem about another poet, and we also see him handling and discoursing on apples and peaceably tending his overgrown orchard much as he might have done on the occasion of Sebald’s visit. The film memorializes the passing on of literary memory, not only through acts of reading, rereading, and translation, but through setting and association, house and orchard, image and text. In this rooted setting, death is implied in the unstated play between present location and past dislocation: the literary afterlives of poets and writers become haunting presences in a life already made ghostly by Sebald in The Rings of Saturn. Finally, I will turn to Gerhard Richter’s Apple Trees (1987), a series of  landscape paintings in which his own amateur photography underlies a deceptively blurred and banal version of  pastoral, rendered knowingly mendacious by the postwar histories of both East and West Germany. Walter Benjamin compares the images deposited in the past to those of a light-sensitive plate that only the future renders legible. In his words, “The reader . . . is the true historian.”4 Confronted by the featureless pastoral landscapes superimposed on Richter’s snapshots, the viewer becomes a historian of  illegibility.

After Pastoral Heaney’s translation of “The Apple Orchard” garners (the archaic verb is deliberate) the recollections of a rich harvest of reflections—past and present hopes, feelings, and husbandry; a life lived and finally surrendered as if by an act of  will: Come just after the sun has gone down, watch This deepening of green in the evening sward: Is it not as if we’d long since garnered And stored within ourselves a something which pastoral, after history  |  37

From feeling and from feeling recollected, From new hope and half-forgotten joys And from an inner dark infused with these Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered Here under trees like trees in a Dürer woodcut— Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years Gravid in them until the fruit appears— Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted In the knowledge that no matter how above Measure or expectation, all must be Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in mute resolve.5 Translation (like quotation) becomes a form of memory. The husbandry of years, “gravid” or pregnant, weighs down Rilke’s trees with fruit and thought. Patient in the expectation of yield, a long life cleaves to its appointed end. Rilke’s garnerings from a life given over to willing only quiet growth and fulfillment become in Heaney’s version at once more willed and more resolute: cleaving to “what’s willed” in a “mute resolve.” Heaney’s combined resolve and muteness are those of the unshowy husbandry of poems replete with fullness, a pregnant harvest of inner dark as well as hopes and joys. This internal store of feeling recollected in tranquility is lyric poetry as traditionally defined—here made gravid with the traumatic history that intervenes between Rilke’s poem and Heaney’s translation. The mythic fall constitutive of pastoral is the subject of one of Dürer’s most famous wood engravings: The Fall (1511; fig. 2.1). The rest is history. Heaney follows Rilke in invoking Dürer: “Here under trees like a Dürer woodcut.” The Edenic landscape with its dark and sinewy lines, cut into apple or pear wood (the fine-grained species used for wood engraving), becomes a metaphor not only for pruning and incision but for the work of poetic composition and translation. Pruning with knife and pen focuses the act of composition, as a kind of  knowledge gathered from, as well as in, darkness, then grafted onto preexisting stock (the translator’s source text). In The Rings of Saturn, when Sebald punctuates his East Anglian wanderings with a visit to the poet-translator Michael Hamburger, he acts as a secondary witness to Hamburger’s interrupted life, drifting into a strange form of identification as his prose weaves in and out of his own and Hamburger’s mingled recollections. Grafting one narrative onto another creates a new 38  |  chapter two

figure 2.1. Albrecht Dürer, The Fall, from Passio Christi ab Alberto Dürer (Nürnberg, 1511). Courtesy of Cambridge University Library.

literary species: neither fact nor fiction but a pregnant tissue of quotation and allusion. Place becomes an uncanny home away from home as Sebald blends the rural Suffolk of his visit to Hamburger with the metropolitan past of Hamburger’s Berlin childhood: “My hallucinations and dreams, Michael writes elsewhere, often take place in a setting reminiscent partly of pastoral, after history  |  39

figure 2.2. Poster given by W. G. Sebald to Michael Hamburger. Location photograph from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007). Courtesy of Tacita Dean, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

the metropolis of Berlin and partly of rural Suffolk.”6 Sebald’s greeting gift to Hamburger was a poster of ancient apple varieties superimposed on a ghostly topographical map, caught by Tacita Dean’s inquiring photographic eye (fig. 2.2).7 Translation becomes a form of recovered memory, preserving the vanished Berlin of Hamburger’s childhood, just as the imaginary Silesian landscape of  Myslowitz (“a place somewhere in Poland”) is glimpsed nostalgically from the cold window of the Edinburgh house to which Hamburger’s family moved in 1933 to escape Nazi Germany. “Does one begin to translate elegies at the age of fifteen or sixteen because one has been exiled from one’s homeland?” Sebald asks—himself a later exile.8 Translation begins in uprooting. This is Hamburger ventriloquized by Sebald—a writer-in-exile who would not, however, translate himself, preferring to write in his native language, in a kind of superimposed linguistic exile. The Sebald of The Rings of Saturn has the same relation to Hamburger as the narrator figure in 40  |  chapter two

Austerlitz has to the eponymous Jacques Austerlitz, another displaced refugee who encounters his forgotten Kinder-transport identity as an adult—literally discovering his lost childhood in a station waiting room. The master of obsessive travels around a periphery with a missing center or absent meaning, Sebald implies the impossibility of recovering historical memory except in fragmentary images and ephemera. What remains is the detritus of forced migration and melancholy resettlement, chance encounter and prescripted coincidence. Pastoral (like translation) is grafted onto tradition, elegiac about its passing. The fiction of prior rootedness is always lost in translation, self-alienated. The conversation during Sebald’s Suffolk visit to Hamburger also concerns Hölderlin, the year of whose birth, 1770 (one of the many coincidental or commemorative dates in Sebald’s writing), is the date on the water-pump in Hamburger’s Suffolk garden. Sebald quotes from Hölderlin: “For when I heard that one of the near islands was Patmos, I greatly desired there to be lodged, and there to approach the dark grotto.” Sebald recalls Hamburger’s translation of  “Patmos,” a poem “For the landgrave of  Homburg.”9 A notably nonliteral translator who began working on Hölderlin’s poetry many years before, Hamburger is rerooted in layers of memory spanning Berlin and Edinburgh, Silesia and Suffolk, Hölderlin’s Patmos and Sebald’s mother’s maiden name (which happens—by chance or Sebaldian design—to be Homburg). These texts have always been read before, déjà lu, converging in the overdetermined world of Sebald’s ingeniously layered prose. The preserved fruit on the pantry shelves and “a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window” catch Sebald’s eye: “And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light much as the golden apples likened in Proverbs to a word fitly spoken, the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things . . . had all outlasted me, and that Michael was taking me round a house in which I myself had lived a long time ago.”10 “A word fitly spoken”—the translator’s word?—links a pantry full of apples to the craft of  poetry. Shining in their half-light, Hamburger’s apples illuminate a life lived in quotation and translation. The pregnant allusion is to the King James Bible: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Proverbs 25.11). Heaney’s other translation from Rilke, “After the Fire,” takes a more overtly traumatized landscape as its subject: Early autumn morning hesitated, Shying at newness, an emptiness behind pastoral, after history  |  41

Scorched linden trees still crowding in around The moorland house, now just one more wallstead Where youngsters gathered up from god knows where Hunted and yelled and ran wild in a pack. Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared, The son of the place, and with a long forked stick Dragged an out-of-shape old can or kettle From under hot, half burnt-away house-beams; And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell, Turned to the others present, at great pains To make them realize what had stood so. For now that it was gone, it all seemed Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh. And he was changed: a foreigner among them.11 Yesterday, a homestead; today, deep time—“more fantastical than Pharaoh.” The boy of the house, unhoused, becomes a foreigner, estranged by the destruction of his family’s domestic hearth; he can no longer be just one of the gang—at pains to tell his tale yet unable to translate it from an incomprehensibly alien tongue. Trouble, the Troubles, make themselves known obliquely, in a repeated historical violence that subsumes this local conflagration into many burnings, many acts of destruction. Only a few trees are left: scorched lindens (lime trees), associated in German Romantic culture with love of home and attachment to an idyllic rural past, as in Hölderlin’s poem “Home,” for instance (“Here where . . . sweet lime trees give out their fragrance . . .”).12 Like the wallstead (roofless, no longer a farmstead), the linden trees mark a desolate space. The ruins of the past invoke a traditional lament for the fallen walls of a destroyed hall; this is an ubi sunt lament, as Heaney (a student of Old English) would certainly have known. But it is a later history that he has in mind, and he means it to be in ours. Scorched trees and burnt-away beams image a destruction that is not timeless but “after history”—caught in the still-smoldering moment that is now.

After Memory Tacita Dean’s Michael Hamburger pays homage to Hamburger and (indirectly) to Sebald’s account of his visit in The Rings of Saturn. Hamburger holds and handles three darkly brilliant apples harvested from a tree origi42  |  chapter two

nally grown from a pip given him by another poet-gardener: Ted Hughes. Hughes’s apple originates in a West Country orchard; the pip has been transplanted to the harsher climate of Hamburger’s Suffolk garden. The poem Hamburger reads aloud is his memorial on the death of  Hughes, “For Ted Hughes, October 29th 1998.” The closing stanza of Hamburger’s elegy testifies to the double memorial of literary friendship contained in poems and apples: Uneaten this day of  his death In either light the dark Devonshire apples lie That from seed I raised on a harsher coast In remembrance of  him and his garden. Difference filled out the trees, Hardened, mellowed the fruit to outlast our days.13 This memorial for a fellow poet links orchard trees, acts of remembrance, and poetic legacies; both will “outlast our days.” Discoursing thoughtfully on the histories of antique apples and the distinctive qualities of individual species—from their skin and color to their subtle aroma and shelf life— Hamburger reflects on the gathering and storing of apples, seen in the film on the deep windowsill of  his pantry just as Sebald recalled them (fig. 2.3). Dean’s film is a visual and aural exploration of Hamburger’s working space. The camera moves unobtrusively between inside and outside, following the wanderings and musings of poet and gardener as he goes about his work. Intimately known and lovingly handled, his apples resemble the fruit-by-fruit harvest of  poems, a hardened and mellowed legacy transferred from one poet—“Magnanimous helper, friend”—to another. They belong to the same store whose material signs are the accumulated books, papers, and reading-glass cases of his working space (fig. 2.4). Hamburger’s hoard of jiffy bags—earlier recorded by Sebald’s photograph in the text of The Rings of Saturn—represents the harvest as well as detritus of the life of a professional poet and translator.14 Instead of seeing him at work, we see him from behind, through a half-open door, absorbed at his desk, or wandering alone among trees. Dean films the orchard as it responds to wind and sun, its sounds and transient weather effects caught visually and aurally in real time: clouds moving, trees swaying, grass bending, flurries of movement and stillness alternating with shots of apples ripening and glowing like Hesperidean fruit on the bough. Meanwhile, the poet muses and browses, pocketing windfalls, discarding rotten fruit, or reaching up to harvest a single apple with his long-handled apple-picker. At once solitary and hospitable, he pastoral, after history  |  43

figure 2.3. Apples on sill. Location photograph from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007). Courtesy of Tacita Dean, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

invites the visiting camera’s gaze: “each garden of mine,” writes Hamburger in his memoir, String of Beginnings (quoting one of  his own poems), “became ‘an unguarded solitude, hospitable to all.’ What the visitors could make of it was up to them.”15 Hamburger’s trope draws on the traditional association of gardens and thinking, Horatian seclusion and poetry. Scarcely differentiated from his desk, Hamburger’s garden is a private space that replicates the hospitable solitude glimpsed through the half-open door of his study. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald not only enters Hamburger’s Suffolk home, feeling as if he had been there before, but slips into Hamburger’s hospitable alter ego, drifting imperceptibly into retelling a version of the story that Hamburger tells in his own memoir. This story—departure from Berlin, aged nine, arrival in England and (importantly) English in translation—provides the basis for Sebald’s reinvention of memory as a kind of obituary: “How little there has remained in me of my native country, the chronicler observes as he scans the few memories he still possesses, barely enough for an obituary of a 44  |  chapter two

figure 2.4. Michael Hamburger’s desk. Location photograph from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007). Courtesy of Tacita Dean, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

lost boyhood.” Sebald’s inventory renders objects, smells, and associations ephemeral: “The mane of a Prussian lion, a Prussian nanny, caryatids bearing the globe on their shoulders, the mysterious sounds of  traffic and motor horns . . .—were these not all merely fantasms, delusions, that had dissolved into thin air?”16 Where does Hamburger’s memoir end and Sebald’s reconstruction begin? The surfacing of these ghostly fantasms and delusions signals memory’s ruination: “we believe we can remember. But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down.” The fallen buildings of  Berlin become a smudge, an erasure: “If I now look back to Berlin, writes Michael, all I see is a darkened background with a grey smudge on it, a slate pencil drawing . . . blurred and half wiped away with a damp rag.”17 This dimly inscribed memory-scape—“some unclear numbers and letters in a gothic script”—becomes a sign of the blurring of memory. In Sebald’s composite first-person recollection, the “smoke-blackened brick walls and fields of rubble” are those of postwar Berlin, “the ruins through which I wandered pastoral, after history  |  45

in 1947 when I [Sebald’s Hamburger] returned to my native city for the first time to search for traces of the life I had lost.”18 Hamburger writes in his own memoir that he actually recognized nothing; his first postwar visit was simply “too brief and hectic for [him] to begin the long process of recognition among so much rubble and empty spaces.”19 Hamburger’s nostos, then, was a “blind spot,” not just a smudge: it occluded the image of an unrecognizably empty and ruined city. By contrast, Sebald’s imaginary narrative places Hamburger in front of the Charlottenburg apartment block of his childhood, miraculously undestroyed, drifting into the peculiar past-continuous tense that is the hallmark of  Sebald’s memory-writing: “I can still feel the cold breath of air that brushed my brow as I entered the hallway, and I recall that the cast-iron balustrade on the stairs, the stucco garlands on the walls, the spot where the perambulator had been parked, and the largely unchanged names on the metal letter boxes, appeared to me like pictures in a rebus that I simply had to puzzle out correctly in order to cancel the monstrous events that had happened since we emigrated.”20 Sebald (in the guise of  Hamburger’s revenant) puzzles over the rebus of past time, contemplating the past—“wreckage upon wreckage”—as does Benjamin’s Angel of History.21 In fantasy, Sebald’s Hamburger entertains the idea that he alone, “as if by some trifling mental exertion [he] could reverse the entire course of history,” might magically restore the status quo ante, his grandmother still washing her goldfish under the kitchen tap and giving them their weekly airing, although she has long since been sent on a final journey to the East marked only by the arrival of a Red Cross postcard.22 Still inhabiting the ghostly body of  Hamburger, Sebald wanders amid salvaged rows of  bricks under the snow-laden November sky of ruined Berlin: a melancholy reconstruction of what might have been. One expects a photograph—or at least a mention in Hamburger’s memoir. But there is no trace of either, unless they are to be found in the images of ruin gathered in another book, On the Natural History of Destruction. An orchard is not an orchard but a lieu de mémoire. The Suffolk countryside is overlaid by the allotments and speeding taxis of Berlin; the threshold of Hamburger’s house leads to the world of his grandparents’ museum-like apartment, a ghostly gathering of the living and dead among whom Sebald’s Hamburger feels himself moving unseen until he arrives at the room in the Edinburgh house that was the destination of his first childhood journey, its windows looking onto the Silesian retrospect seen by his exiled father. Memory-work, intergenerational and interleaved, shapes a prequel memoir. The grafted narrative of The Rings of Saturn—returning to the present with 46  |  chapter two

a cup of tea in a Suffolk garden—superimposes one homecoming onto another’s obscurely familiar home away from home. Sebald makes the source text a little harder to read; he makes it, in fact, a ghost story. In his translator’s note to Unrecounted (2005), Hamburger comments on Sebald’s prosthetic practice. The context is his inability to track down a quotation from Schumann’s writings in one of the minimalist poems by Sebald paired with Jan Peter Tripp’s meticulously detailed lithographs. The photographic analogy surfaces once more: After reflection the contradiction struck me as one more instance of the freedom from literalness that distinguished Sebald the imaginative writer from Sebald the scholar. This freedom had become apparent to me much earlier, when he sent me his script of his account of a meeting with my wife and me on which he drew—as well as on my book of memoirs—for his The Rings of Saturn. Factual accuracy would have called for the correction of a few biographical details in that account, had it not become clear to me by that time that the very nature of all Sebald’s writings . . . demanded such departures from the source material—that, in the context, it did not matter at all whether or not his account of my childhood experiences accorded with my recollection of them. The very writing of my book of memoirs had brought home to me that memory is a darkroom for the development of fictions. Whatever Schumann wrote in a document I could not find, Sebald’s versions of it will have been drawn from memory and imagination, indivisible as they are. 23 The writer’s return always demands “departures from the source material.” Hamburger concludes that what is significant is Sebald’s “reinterpretation” of Schumann’s words for the purposes of artistic collaboration—“just as my approval of  his account of me meant that I was happy to be a character in his work of fiction.”24 It is not by accident that he refers to memory as “a darkroom for the development of fictions”: apparitional photographs punctuate Sebald’s account of his visit to Hamburger’s house in The Rings of Saturn. The photographs in Sebald’s texts—memory’s trace in the age of mechanical reproduction—become memorial fictions, the detritus of unreliable memory, cited in turn by the poet’s working environment as glimpsed in Dean’s Michael Hamburger. Like the relation of  text and etching in Unrecounted, this “exchange of looks between poets and painters” resembles the click of the photographic shutter: “It follows the rhythm of a blink.”25 In a postscript to his memoir, Hamburger writes: “recollection is inseparable from imagination—and so from invention. Whether one likes pastoral, after history  |  47

it or not, autobiography—as distinct from the documentary patchwork I produced—is a form of fiction.”26 Autobiography, he suggests, involves a sort of “magical transference” or self-identification on the reader’s part: “The more imaginative the writing, the more this transference will approximate to self-identification on the reader’s part.”27 Eschewing this magic, Hamburger found the whole truth untellable; Sebald does it for him in The Rings of Saturn. Hamburger’s reticence finds expression in the half-seen figure of Dean’s film, tracked among orchard trees or through half-open doors, his face averted as he talks, the camera focused on his gnarled hands. For Hamburger himself, this trope of the outdoor poet is a way to dig deeper into his own imaginative life: “Though written indoors, as often as not they [his poems] were conceived and in part composed while I was walking, digging, scything, sawing or chopping wood, planting or clearing up a plot.”28 Cultivating his garden was as essential an occupation to him as writing. PostEdenic gardening—even the creation of a wild garden like Hamburger’s orchard—is an art form that already takes place in the time and space of culture.

After Nature In his essay on Jan Peter Tripp’s meticulous trompe l’oeil effects—“behind the illusions of the surface a dread-inspiring depth is concealed”—Sebald suggests that the details in Tripp’s lithographs function as a kind of shrine to memory: “Time lost, the pain of remembering and the figure of death have there been assembled in a memorial shrine as quotations from the painter’s own life. Remembrance, after all, in essence is nothing other than a quotation.”29 The effect of such memorial quotation, whether incorporated in text or lithograph, compels us (with Umberto Eco) “to probe our knowledge of other texts and pictures and our knowledge of the world”; by spending time like this, we enter “into time recounted and into the time of culture.”30 The time of culture is the time “after nature.” The recovery of unrecounted time, with its montage and picture-puzzles, patterns, coincidences, and mise en abyme, evokes the ambiguous and baroque mode of Sebald’s writing. One eye is fixed attentively on the present, the other—averted and alien (as Sebald describes the eyes of a dog in one of Tripp’s lithographs)—is “the overshadowed eye that sees through us,” or the death-dealing lens of the memorial apparatus.31 Sebald concludes his essay on Jan Peter Tripp by noting in his work the presence of anomalous objects and temporal disjunc­ tion, complex patterns of quotation and enigmatic detail. Out of such rep48  |  chapter two

resentational mediation, at once textual and visual, Sebald conjures what is unrecounted in the time of culture. Hamburger’s reflections on memoir writing are infused with the sense of its fragmentary and fabricated status: To write about oneself is to write about other people, of whom one knows even less than one knows about oneself; or about events, situations, things, that cannot be recollected at all, only reconstituted by invention; to bear witness, up to a point; but above all, to search for what one didn’t and couldn’t know. . . . Neither the chronicler’s nor the novelist’s way is adequate, because too much of one’s life is beyond recall, and the experience that made us what we are lies neither in moments nor in recurrences, but in a fusion of  both far too subtle to be retraced.32 This sifting of the reconstituted material of involuntary memory antici­pates Sebald’s practice of writing about himself by writing about other people— sometimes in their own words, sometimes in his. What results is neither chronicle nor novel; as one experience or voice blurs into another’s, memoirs and “found” photographs become image quotations, not so much a form of documentation as a writing device—what Sebald calls “barriers or weirs which stem the flow,” effecting a release from “the passage of time” and slowing down the speed of reading.33 Spellbound during his visit to Hamburger’s house by the high-ceilinged rooms and abandoned apparatuses for reading and writing (“spectacles cases, letters and writing materials”), Sebald asks: How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor? The fact that I first passed through British customs thirty-three years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol—none of these things are particularly strange. But why was it that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain.34 This fictional amalgam (Hamburger/Sebald) is captured in the pace of Sebald’s own slow-moving, déjà vu prose, where the present tense approximates to the past tense of someone else’s experience like a ghostly double trailing after the past. Sebald’s conundrum arrests the movement of time as his photographs do, slowing fiction’s inclination toward its end.35 Is he visiting or revisiting the past? And whose time past is this? pastoral, after history  |  49

In a funereal moment, as Sebald leaves Hamburger’s garden, he sees “with a shudder that went to the roots of [his] hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.”36 Cultural quotation masquerading as memory surfaces by way of  Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos letter, “Ein Brief ” (1902), a fictional letter of 1603 to Francis Bacon. Something as visceral as a shudder, or as minute as a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, signals the ghostly citation of literary reminiscence—in this case, von Hofmannsthal’s letter as it rows across the surface of Sebald’s prose. Hamburger writes apropos of his own long work of translating Hölderlin: “Involvement with the dead, almost as much as with the living, was indeed a peculiarity of mine, not only as a writer and translator, and connected with the gloom for which I was notorious.”37 A trace of this gloom surfaces in Sebald’s melodramatic shudder. Hofmannsthal’s fictional letter announces a modernist crisis in language and writing. Sebald’s apparent fidelity to reality is accompanied by a disturbing sense of unreality and repetition, as if (in the hands of Jan Peter Tripp) he were in the grip of “some illusionist working with tricks not to be seen through.”38 Shuddering over a water beetle becomes a form of historical reminiscence, a moment that reconfigures the past in the present.39 Writing of  his inner crisis, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos says that he has “completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all”—an affliction that renders the ordinary vertiginously magnified.40 On his visit to Hamburger’s house, Sebald relates that he felt as if he “was losing the ground from under [his] feet,” unable “to lay the ghosts of repetition” that haunt him.41 Ghost stories are in the air as he talks to his hosts, but repetition surfaces in the peculiar form of citation: the ghostly presence of another text. Imagining a language beyond death in which mute things speak, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos makes insignificant creatures—“a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart path winding over the hill, a mosscovered stone”—the vehicle for infinite meaning: Where could you find pity or any comprehensible association of human ideas if on some other evening I find under a nut tree a half-full watering can that a gardener’s boy has forgotten there, and this watering can and the water in it, dark from the shadow of the tree, and a water beetle sculling on the surface of the water from one dark shore to the other, this confluence of trivialities shoots through me from the roots of my hair to the marrow of my toes with such a presence of the infinite that I want to 50  |  chapter two

bring out words, knowing that any words I found would vanquish those cherubim in which I do not believe?42 Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos imagines “a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself some day when I am dead and standing before an unknown judge.”43 This posthumous language in which mute things speak is the language at which Sebald shudders. Death—a confluence of trivialities—is already in the garden. Apropos of Sebald’s interest in the unrecounted or unobserved, Hamburger instances his camera-sharp spotting of a solitary peach on a tree in his orchard that he thought would never bear fruit again—what he calls “an invitation to look again at the thing given up” and the importance of seeing in Sebald’s work.44 This attachment to “the thing given up” could be read as sheer nostalgia (for orchard, linden, or peach tree), were it not for the way it displays—in Hamburger’s words—“loving attention to the whatness of seemingly trivial things.”45 Hence Unerzählt: untold or overlooked. In Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos letter, this attentiveness takes the form of an overwhelming cosmic inrush of mute universal suffering; nothing is too small to become surcharged with meaning and pain, not even a beetle. For Sebald, this vision is connected with collective repression—the refusal to see or remember historical disaster—that is recorded elsewhere, in his prose poem After Nature, for instance. Here Sebald provides his own sidelong self-portrait in that of the ambiguous identity of the sixteenth-century Matthias Grünewald, aka Mathis Nihart, the melancholic painter whose Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1510–15) depicts a nightmare world “after nature”—“Grünewald, / silently wielding his paintbrush, / rendered the scream, the wailing, the gurgling / and the shrieking of a pathological spectacle / to which he and his art . . . belong.”46 Not surprisingly, the Nazis regarded Grünewald’s art of suffering as degenerate. Sebald’s After Nature depicts both the botched “absence of balance in nature / which blindly makes one experiment after another” and apocalyptic destruction, where “the earth trembles and the great city . . . stands in flames.”47 Such conflagrations abound in Sebald’s little history of Germany, where (for instance) around 1240 the Jews of Frankfurt were slaughtered or “died of their own free will / in a conflagration” or, in Grünewald’s time, were imprisoned in a ghetto and locked up each evening and on Sunday afternoon so that they “might not walk into any place / where a green tree pastoral, after history  |  51

grew.”48 Sebald speaks in an interview of his interest in the cultural and social history of Jewish-German assimilation, where identification between the Jewish population and Germany itself was mapped onto “the topography of the country, through their surnames. They were called Frankfurt or Hamburger or Wiener. They were, as it were, identified with these places. And it must have been extremely hard for them to abandon all this and to forget about it.”49 The relationship between the Jewish minority of Germany and the larger German population formed, he says, one of the motives for his attempt to understand the cultural environment into which he himself was born. The war crime trials (e.g., the 1963–65 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt) were the background to his own coming of age, in the midst of what he calls, retrospectively, a conspiracy of silence.50 For this reason, he writes, “I’ve grown up feeling that there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust.” These witnesses may be inscriptions, quotations, images, or traces: “These are different kinds of history lessons. They’re not in the history books.”51 Hence the hybrid, accretive mode of his writing: neither history nor fiction, neither memoir nor entirely invention, but a composite form of witnessing.

After History Sebald’s project in After Nature is to investigate the German past—and his own—through history lessons that are not in the history books. The epigraph for the third part of After Nature comes from Virgil’s Eclogues: “and now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops / and from high mountains the greater shadows fall.” One speaker is going into exile; the other invites him to linger: “Yet this night you might have rested here with me on the green leafage. We have ripe apples.”52 This is the historical time of Sebald’s own pre-posthumous birth. He begins with the narrative of his grandparents driving to be married in 1905 and with photographs of their children, including one of  his mother and father dated 26 August 1943, the day before his father’s departure for Dresden, “of  whose beauty his memory, as he / remarks when I question him, / retains no trace.” On the night that followed, “582 aircraft flew in / to attack Nürnberg” (Grünewald’s city). His pregnant mother, “who on the next day planned / to return to her parents’ / home in the Alps,” got no further than Fürth: . . . From there she saw Nürnberg in flames, 52  |  chapter two

figure 2.5. Albrecht Altdorfer, Lot and His Daughters (1537). Oil on linden wood. Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

but cannot recall now what the burning town looked like or what her feelings were at this sight.53 His mother is carrying the recently conceived poet, a mute and unseeing witness to the unrecalled and over-looked sight of the burning city of Nürenberg. Sebald compares it to Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting Lot and His Daughters (1537), “depicting Lot / with his daughters. On the horizon / a terrible conflagration blazes, / devouring a large city.” We arrive at the heart of a firestorm—the narrative of ruin that is the place of conception for the next generation of Moabites. One tiny, naked, Eve-like figure in the pastoral background seems to shield her head from the firestorm behind her (fig. 2.5). For Sebald himself, this obscure optical trauma is indescribable except in the afterimage of the flight of Lot with his daughter, nestled nakedly against the green cloak of a postlapsarian bower while Sodom burns in the background: Smoke ascends from the site, the flames rise to the sky and pastoral, after history  |  53

in the blood-red reflection one sees the blackened facades of houses. In the middle ground there is a strip of idyllic green landscape .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . When for the first time I saw this picture the year before last, I had the strange feeling of  having seen all of it before.54 That strange déjà vu feeling marks another moment of citation, like Sebald’s vertigo on his visit to Hamburger or his shudder at the water beetle as he leaves. What is uncanny here, even maddening (“I nearly went out of my mind”), is the sense of having lived through someone else’s experiences, experiences that predate one’s own birth. Note too how the details of the painting, with its tiny blackened houses against the conflagration and its bloody reflection in the water, are set off by the idyllic green landscape. It is as if the two histories are intertwined: no bower without its background of destruction, no conception without historical guilt; no looking without noticing the unrecounted detail. Prenatal catastrophe becomes the precondition for individual historical consciousness. Sebald writes of having grown up “on the northern / edge of the Alps . . . without any / idea of destruction.” Yet he was preoccupied as a child with “a scarcely identifiable disaster.”55 As an adult, he dreams of flying over the ocean from East Anglia to Munich and Frankfurt. In an apocalyptic vision, Altdorfer’s vertiginous Alexander’s Victory (The Battle at the Issus) (1529) opens up beneath his gaze: “Far more than one hundred thousand / so the inscriptions proclaim, / number the dead over whom / the battle surges for the salvation / of the Occident.” In this bird’s-eye view, Sebald puts air war under the magnifying glass of history. The chaplain “who / had hung up an oleograph / of the battle scene beside / the blackboard” explains it as “a demonstration / of the necessary destruction of all / the hordes coming up from the East.”56 From the miniaturization of this “truly Asiatic spectacle,” writes Sebald, one slowly learns “to see that side of  life / that one could not see before”: a flying crane’s vision of the ruins of the past.57 In his Zurich lectures, “ Air War and Literature,” Sebald comments apropos of Alexander Kluge’s bird’s-eye view of a ruined city: “Here Kluge is looking down, both 54  |  chapter two

literally and metaphorically, from a vantage point above the destruction.”58 This is also the backward retrospect of Benjamin’s Angel of History. Sebald’s “ Air War and Literature”—associated with “the perspective from which I myself look back on the terrible events of those years”—explicitly invokes Benjamin’s Angel, whose “face is turned toward the past . . . he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” as he is propelled on his way by the storm of so-called progress.59 Seemingly “untouched by the catastrophe” before his birth, Sebald’s mind is marked by what he never witnessed: “this catastrophe had none the less left its mark on my mind.” His subject is the willed obliteration of history: “those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation.” Consequently, “we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history”—“we are always looking and looking away at the same time.”60 Sebald’s antidote to this averted, antihistorical look is the testimonial and photographic record of  wholesale urban destruction in the wake of air war: the blackened and rubble-strewn ruined streets of cities such as Frankfurt and Pfortzheim (bombed in 1945) contrast with the reconstructed urban landscape of obliterated memory. After Nature employs the persistent trope of a gaze averted, along with the self-anesthesia and repression he associates with the post–World War II German economic miracle. Even those who paid attention, writes Sebald, regarded the firestorms that destroyed cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nürnberg, and Dresden “as a just punishment, even an act of retribution on the part of a higher power” (as if God was still punishing Sodom and Gomorrah). Debate about the morality of bombing civilians had been foreclosed by those who (such as “Bomber” Harris) “liked destruction for its own sake” and for whom war was an end in itself: “The war in the air was war pure and undisguised,” aimed at “as wholesale an annihilation of the enemy with his dwellings, his history and his natural environment as can possibly be achieved.”61 Sebald’s “natural history of destruction”—which is also a natural history of ruins—includes the overrunning of bomb sites by rats and their overgrowing by weeds and vegetation. By the end of the war, “some of the bomb sites of Cologne had already been transformed by the dense green vegetation growing over them,” and in 1943, after the bombing of Hamburg and “a few months before the great fire,” chestnuts and lilacs were experiencing a second flowering.62 Sebald ironically footnotes a 1944 proposal by the U.S. secretary of state Hans Morgenthau “calling for the ‘pastoralization’ of Germany by the removal of all its heavy industry.” If this plan had been adopted, Sebald wonders, “how long would it have taken for pastoral, after history  |  55

woodland to cover the mountains of ruins all over the country?”63 Pastoral after history, indeed.

Coda: Richter’s Apple Trees Frequently viewed as a history painter as well as a landscape painter, Gerhard Richter is preoccupied by the impossibility of representing historical fact.64 Like Sebald, he interrogates the role of  photography both as a form of forgetting or repression and as a recurrent haunting by historical trauma.65 Born in Dresden in 1932 and educated in its art academy, he would have been twelve at the time of the city’s destruction; like Sebald, he chose to leave his home in the 1960s—in this case, crossing from East to West Germany. His pastoral landscapes contain an underlying accusation. For Benjamin Buchloh, photography—both in its construction of  history and as a form of collective disavowal of the recent East and West German past—becomes the means by which Richter attempts “to reconstruct remembrance from within the social and geo-political space of the society that inflicted trauma.”66 Richter’s Atlas project, with its accumulation of “found” or deliberately iterated subjects and photographs, is allied to other avant-garde archival projects of the 1960s. A kind of history not to be found in history books—personal, aesthetic, allusive—it becomes a mnemonic device that alludes both to Aby Warburg’s earlier Atlas and to the photographic accumulation of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk.67 The context of Richter’s memory-project is a twentieth-century debate about the role of the photographic image in simultaneously constructing historical memory and destroying both memory and historical thought. For Buchloh, the origins of  Richter’s Atlas lie in his interrogation of photography as a practice of ideological domination—“as one of the instruments with which collective anomie, amnesia and repression were socially inscribed.”68 Family photographs, holiday snaps, and amateur landscape photographs remain just that until displayed in the rigid grids of Richter’s Atlas, when it becomes possible to read them as a comment on the collective disavowal of postwar German history. Richter can be seen as exploring “the various registers of photography as the representational system within which historical repression is physically enacted and transmitted.”69 Placed alongside postwar cityscapes or pictures of Holocaust atrocities, Richter’s bland holiday snaps and landscapes change their meaning. We are compelled to read them not simply in the light of Richter’s provocation—“some amateur 56  |  chapter two

photos [are] better than the best Cézanne”—but as marked by mass media’s romanticization of nature.70 Richter notes in 1986 that he began painting from photographs as a way of avoiding “any commitment to the subject”—hence his so-called soft abstracts, which “used blurring and enlargement to create a variant of NonShowing.”71 He elsewhere calls this treatment “giving a demonstration of indifference.”72 Banality—not just as a form of psychic anesthesia but as an aesthetic in its own right—becomes constitutive of the “amateur photo.” Buchloh interprets the theme of banality in Richter’s work as a critique of “the psychic armor with which Germans of the postwar period protected themselves against historical insight.”73 But Richter’s own form of Romantic attachment to landscape has also been seen as the legacy of Heideggerian modernity, with its undertow of loss.74 Richter himself (ever anti-ideological) confesses to nostalgia when he identifies in his landscapes “a type of yearning, a yearning for a whole and simple life. A little nostalgic.”75 Divorced from affect by the flatness of the photographic image and the obviousness of natural tableaux, his nostalgia is more than Benjaminian image-critique; it manifests a darker, altogether more negative form of alienation than Sebald’s interest in natural phenomena like fog and mist, “which render the environment and one’s ability to see it almost impossible.”76 In Richter’s practice, the impossibility of seeing is taken to an extreme; he writes that he gets rid of the picture “in the first few layers, which I destroy, layer by layer, until . . . I end up with a work of destruction.”77 What Rilke saw as nature’s liberating indifference is for Richter the lie of culture stripped away by his painting. In 1986, the year before the Apple Trees series, he wrote: Of course my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all “untruthful” (even if I did not always find a way of showing it); and by “untruthful” I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature—Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves, absolutely inhuman.78 “Every beauty that we see in landscape,” he concludes, “is our projection”; switching it off reveals “the appalling horror and ugliness.” Richter’s overpainting of the photograph creates an art of indifference, yet it registers (despite itself) nature’s immanent hostility; his antinostalgic aesthetic unmasks pastoral, after history  |  57

figure 2.6. Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees (Apfelbäume) (1987). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. © Gerhard Richter 2011.

untruth through its difference from, as well as indifference to, the spectacle of nature. Richter’s landscapes have been accurately called “landscapes at one remove.”79 The Apple Trees (Apfelbäume) series of 1987 uses successive stages of abstraction—from snapshot resemblance to the misty shapes of  the third painting—to empty landscape of its pastoral associations by successive de-realizations (figs. 2.6–2.8). In the 1960s, Richter wrote that he employed blurring with studied neutrality, “to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.”80 Later, however, he responds to a question about his use of blurring by invoking mistrust of the image itself. While his relation to reality may include “imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever,” blurring in his paintings now signals “that they are different from the object represented.”81 They exist in their own right, not as representations of an imprecisely or fleetingly rendered reality. In the Apple Trees series, an innocuous pastoral landscape is made not just banal but strangely unrecognizable once deprived of its Romantic aura. The 58  |  chapter two

figure 2.7. Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees (Apfelbäume) (1987). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. © Gerhard Richter 2011.

hiker’s track through a flowery meadow takes an untoward turn; the third in the series becomes an unsettlingly affectless apparition—Richter’s “demonstration of indifference” to (or in) nature. Without the traditional trope of the Alpine wanderer, the winding path leading to no “beyond,” Richter’s Apple Trees series is unmoored from pastoral and enters history: the history of the pastoral image itself. As in Richter’s interrogation of the sublime—his cloudscapes, mountainscapes, and seascapes—natural appearances exist in a present that is historical by virtue of its disavowal of immanence: “ A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies for example. . . . It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich ‘today.’ ”82 Painting like Caspar David Friedrich “today” registers the specific set of circumstances that render it banal or deceptive. This is Richter’s definitive response to the always-tense relation between pastoral and nostalgia. His pastorals are necessarily “after history” because they are relocated in the historical present. As Benjamin writes, “It’s not that what is pastoral, after history  |  59

figure 2.8. Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees (sketch) (Apfelbäume [Skizze]) (1987). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. © Gerhard Richter 2011.

past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image [Bild] is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”83 Historical knowledge emerges in the now of the dialectical image as a form of knowledge that is “possible only in the historical moment.”84 Pastoral in Richter, as in Heaney’s “ After the Fire” and in Sebald’s After Nature, is the specific form of historical knowledge that emerges in the wake of destruction.

60  |  chapter two

chapter 3

Touching Things “nutting” and the standing of trees with gentle hand / Touch,—for there is a Spirit in the woods. — William Wordsworth, “Nutting,” ll. 52–531 To touch with tact is to touch without touching that which does not let itself be touched. — Jacques Derrida, On Touching (2000)2 It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. — Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? (1972)3

S

ince 1972, when Christopher Stone published his groundbreaking article “Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Romantic literary criticism has gone green in ways that Stone could scarcely have envisaged. His proposal that legal rights should be given to forests, oceans, and rivers—an opening salvo in the campaign for environmental protection—broached what Stone called “the unthinkable.” Under Common Law, trees had no standing in their own right. They could not seek redress for injuries, nor could others plead on their behalf. Stone proposed that trees, like other entities that cannot speak for themselves (infants, incompetents, cities, or universities), should have guardians to bring cases for them. In 1970, the nonprofit Sierra Club had challenged a decision to allow Walt Disney Enterprises Inc. to construct the Mineral King Resort in Sequoia National Forest. The trees lost (although the resort was never built). But as a result of the dissenting opinions of Supreme Court Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Blackmun, the unthinkable became thinkable. Justice Blackmun came out in favor of “an imaginative expansion of our traditional concepts of standing.” Justice Douglas went even further: “The voice of the inanimate object . . . should not be stilled.”4 61

It will be no surprise to literary critics that figures of speech (our old friends personification and prosopopoeia) should surface when justices appeal to the imagination. Stone—who also refers to the speechlessness of streams and forests—attributes the psychic difficulty of giving up homocentric ideas about the status of natural objects to unease about childhood anthropomorphism. Rhetoric and psyche meet at the site of environmentalism and poetry. Enter the romance of the Mutilated Bower.5 Like other episodes in The Prelude that estrange the natural world (e.g., stealing boats and raiding birds’ nests), Wordsworth’s “Nutting” involves an act of intrusive injury, in this case against nut trees. Critics such as Geoffrey Hartman have seen the case of the Mutilated Bower as the story of nature’s violation by imagination—a violation that leads, however, to its precarious marriage with nature, a consummation breathlessly anticipated in “Nutting”: at length I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation, but the hazels rose Tall and erect with milk-white clusters hung, A virgin scene! (ll. 14–19) Hartman comments: “The action here is almost purely psychological.”6 But what kind of psychological action is this exactly? Where one critic reads the ravage of the virgin scene as inaugurating a new consciousness of nature and self, another reader might glimpse sexual latency; the word “erect,” used of the hazel bushes, publishes the marauder’s displaced excitement: 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, Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up Their quiet being . . . (ll. 41–46) In this Ferenczian confusion of the language of childhood and the language of passion, “Nutting” seems to invite an eroticized reading.7 Where latency was, there adult sexuality will be, imposing retrospective pain and shame on both boy and bower: “Even then,” writes Wordsworth with compunction, 62  |  chapter three

“unless I now / Confound my present feelings with the past . . . I felt a sense of pain when I beheld / The silent trees and the intruding sky” (ll. 48–51). What interests me in “Nutting,” however, is less the question of sexuality or even latency than the question of touch—touch as it bears on conceptions of the inanimate and insensate world. I want to read the case of the mutilated bower in this way not for psychology but for Psyche, emphasizing the reach of tactility rather than sexual depredation. The “dearest Maiden” (kin to the “one dear nook”) whom “Nutting” admonishes is elsewhere given the name Lucy. Wordsworth’s Lucy has the silence and the calm “Of mute insensate things”; she does not feel the touch of earthly years. Unlike the bower, she is a still unravished bride of quietness. My contention is that by rethinking touch in the light of contemporary philosophy we may be able to reread Wordsworth’s late eighteenth-century philosophy of nature as the basis for a meditation on sense and sense perception. Such a reading prompts reflections on our own ethical relations to the world of inanimate things. But it also bears on another mute insensate thing: the standing of poetry. Wordsworth’s “impassioned nutter” (his own punning neologism) is an endearingly mock-heroic figure: “Tricked out in proud disguise” and “More ragged than need was!”8 We would be misreading the episode if we interpreted rape and pillage too literally. But without resorting to either psychobiography or anthropomorphism, how should we weigh the admonition of the closing lines: “with gentle hand / Touch,—for there is a Spirit in the woods” (ll. 53–54)? What does it mean to touch “with gentle hand” as Wordsworth enjoins his Maiden sister? And what does it mean to touch with tact—or rather, without touching (Derrida’s definition of tact)? To begin to answer these questions, I will turn first to Derrida’s tribute to the work of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, On Touching (2000). Derrida later embarks on a tangential reading of  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom touch is one of the body’s ways of knowing. The path I want to trace leads from touch to phenomenology, via the question of environmental rights, back to ecopoetics and the poetry of Alice Oswald’s meditative and deep-rooted volume Woods etc.9

The Tact Not to Touch Derrida’s On Touching broaches the same terrain as Wordsworth’s “Spirit in the woods.” What kind of spirit is this? How do we sense it, and how (if at all) does it feel about being touched? What mode of “quiet being” is touching things  |  63

suggested by the negative anthropomorphism of “silent trees” and “intruding sky”? In short, what is natural, what is human, and can we distinguish between them? A different question would be to wonder if androcentrism is in-built when it comes to the idea of touch and the language of “sense”: the hand—touching, grasping, possessing—is the mark of the human. Not having sufficiently withdrawn his project from anthropology is the judicious criticism that Derrida levels at Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.10 Since Derrida begins with the work of Nancy, I will start with his reading of  Nancy’s essay “Touching,” from The Sense of the World (1993).11 Nancy’s starting point is Heidegger’s stone. Heidegger’s stone lies on the path and exerts pressure on the earth it touches. A lizard may lie basking on it, but for Heidegger neither are really “touching” in the sense of a touch that involves laying a hand on the head of another being, “because in its being a stone it has no possible access to anything else around it, anything that it might attain or possess as such.”12 Nancy asks why the condition of access means “the identification and appropriation of the ‘other thing.’ ”13 Could it not consist in “being-among, being-between, being-against?”—in remoteness of contact or in being on the threshold? For Nancy, non-access and impenetrability have to exist in order for access and penetration to occur. In his account of things, both stone and lizard belong to the circuit of sense. For Heidegger, the heat of the sun precedes the lizard, just as the hand on the head introduces a hieratic touch that is nonhuman. According to Heidegger, the earth is not “given” for the stone. But for Nancy, the possibility exists of the gift as pure indifference—as a rupture or incised cut, something unassignable and without corresponding desire. A stone may not “handle” things ( pace Heidegger) but for Nancy, “it does touch—or it touches on—with a passive transitivity. It is touched, same difference. The brute entelechy of sense: it is in contact, an absolute difference and an absolute différance.”14 Could one say the same of Wordsworth’s bower in “Nutting”? Like Nancy’s stone, the bower belongs to the world of “contiguities and tangential contacts.” It impinges as well as being violently impinged upon. Nancy objects to the abstractness of  Heidegger’s stone; his own stone, by contrast, is concrete and demands a subject in order to be encountered, thrown, or manipulated. But he is not supposing something that amounts to stony subjectivity: “It is not a matter of endowing the stone with an interiority.”15 This is no huge stone or sea beast sunning itself that simply “was,” with all the imponderable weight of nonhuman being.16 Nancy’s stone belongs to the physical universe, and hence it is liable to sense. But for him there is “no animism.” Rather, a “‘quantum philosophy of nature’ . . . remains to be thought.” 64  |  chapter three

This is a quantum philosopher’s stone. Because all bodies make up the inorganic body of sense, the stone touches sense, or rather, sense touches it: “The stone does not ‘have’ any sense. But sense touches the stone: it even collides with it, and that is what we are doing here.”17 The stone “has” sense only in the sense of colliding with it. Sense involves touch, but for Nancy, “with sense, one must have the tact not to touch it too much.” This is not because the philosopher might stub his toe but rather, as Derrida writes, because “that about which one speaks in speaking of touch is also the intangible. To touch with tact is to touch without touching that which does not let itself be touched.”18 At this moment one glimpses the encounter, not only between a boy and a wood, but between a reader and a poem. In a beautiful chapter called “Psyche,” Derrida meditates on a recurrent reference in Nancy’s writing to a late note by Freud: “Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon” (Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it).19 He transforms this mythic moment into a scene of mourning. Psyche lies sleeping under a tree while (in a reversal of the myth) Eros looks at a woman so deeply asleep as to appear dead, locked in the sleep of selfunknowing. As Derrida puts it, Psyche “is the submissive subject (extended object), the support or subjectile of [others’] knowledge, but not of hers because on her own she knows nothing of herself—on the subject of herself.”20 She resembles Wordsworth’s bower in her lack of self-knowledge or self-reflexivity. Here is Derrida elaborating on Freud’s text: “They [others] see her not seeing herself, that is to say, not seeing herself extended; they know her where she neither knows herself nor knows herself to be seen.”21 Almost intolerably, for the onlooker, “she doesn’t feel herself. She lacks the sense of  herself, which amounts to saying that the sense is what she lacks.”22 Like Lucy, Psyche is insensate (“she knows nothing of herself—on the subject of herself ”). Derrida calls this self-ignorance “almost insupportable” in its pathos; compare the bower that “patiently” gives up its quiet being. Yet to say that the bower is sentient—that it suffers—would be to overlook the specific lack that characterizes Psyche: “the sense is what she lacks.” Derrida’s psychic meditation touches on how we imagine things. Imagination (as Justice Douglas remarks) permits an extension of thought in the direction of the unthinkable—“neither thinking nor knowing, to be sure, but it is in no way a complete absence of thought or knowledge.”23 Imagining the untouchable involves the figure of extension; in other words, it summons the disembodied form of  extension (like that of  Freud’s Psyche), which amounts to metaphor. Derrida’s still life or nature morte stalks up on a concept that will return in his reading of Merleau-Ponty’s “philosopheme”: touching things  |  65

that of touching and self-touching—the incomplete reversibility or reflexivity at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh. Not only is Psyche’s sleep posthumous (like that of the mutilated bower), but she remains “untouchable and from the outset intangible for herself.”24 The difference between thinking and touching—“this thinking about touch must not touch”—is that it must “touch on the untouchable.” In short, it must not touch, or only touch gently: “with gentle hand / Touch . . .” The tableau, Derrida writes, “mourn[s] life itself, and what in life is the very living thing, the living spring, the breath of life.”25 Recognizing something as (barely) alive, or sentient without sense, involves recognizing its proximity to death. Wordsworth calls this life that is close to death “a Spirit in the woods.” Among Nancy’s works, Derrida reminds us, is one titled L’Intrus (2000). As in “Nutting,” the intrusive, the intruder, or intrusion marks the threshold of what is living as well as the intrusion of pain, shame, and otherness. With Derrida’s help, it becomes possible to reengage a reading of “Nutting” for psychoanalysis as a staging of the psyche itself, which cannot be touched, or can only be touched with tact because it is intangible—unknowable as well as unknowing. Equating the bower with the sleeping Psyche runs the risk of returning it to the pathos of the all-too-human. But Psyche’s sleep-untodeath also discloses the difficulty of thinking about the body and psyche together. The intangibility of the spirit in the woods offers a way to think, not only about psyche (which knows nothing about it), but about the perplexing relation of body and mind, and ultimately about the relation of unthinking things to poetry.

What Is It Like to Be a Nut? The rights of the insensible and the rights of the other have received their classic framing in Thomas Nagel’s 1970 thought-experiment “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel states at the outset, “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.”26 Where exactly is consciousness located? His essay worries at the problematic relation of materialist and idealist philosophies to mental states. Could there be a materialist account of mental processes that is neither reductionist nor fanciful? Nagel puts his finger (so to speak) on what is intractable about the stone: its lack of capacity for consciousness. Consciousness may be a problem for the mind-body relation, yet without it, there is nothing much to say. Even if a stone belongs to the quantum philosophy of the senses, the suggestion that it participates in the dormancy of the extended psyche can operate only at the level of 66  |  chapter three

metaphor. Is the same true of a bat?—a small mammalian creature whose consciousness differs radically, if not unimaginably, from ours. Nagel argues that because a bat has perceptions, it must therefore have some form of consciousness. Before Nagel, Freud (without need of a thought-experiment) had found consciousness difficult to account for—a ceaseless barrage of perceptions that eluded psychoanalytic categories. And Freud was not even dealing with the animal world (a bat), let alone with the inanimate world (a stone or a nut). Nagel’s reflection on otherness—what it is like to be some other organism?—broaches forms of subjective experience barely imaginable to human subjectivity. Ultimately, his goal is not to identify with otherness (a form of pathetic fallacy) but to investigate the conditions of possibility by which one might arrive at a materialist account of mental processes based on forms of perception entirely alien to humans: in this case, echolocation. For every dormant Psyche, her Echo. Nagel’s flight of fancy—what would it be like to emit high-pitched sound as a means of locating oneself in the world?—rejects the idea that the metric of likeness must be human subjective experience. What is it like to be a bat is an altogether different question. To the literary reader, however, Nagel’s “what is it like . . . ?” concerns the figure of identification or resemblance as much as an interrogative. This is a trope that derives its power from the intertwining of rhetoric and projection— the metaphors and projections at the heart of the psychic mechanisms that connect us to (or disjoin us from) other people. Inseparably, yet nonequivalently, figures of similitude attribute subjectivity not only to human others but also to animate or inanimate things, endowing them with the capacity to feel pain or to speak a language of their own—to suffer and exist, and even to utter. Nagel is not interested in the figure of resemblance (“what is it like . . . ?”) but rather in “how is it for the subject himself?”27 His question is as hard to answer in respect of oneself as it is in respect of bats. This is Freud’s point about the psyche: the unconscious is a sleeping form of  subjectivity, unavailable to ourselves. Nagel is willing to concede that there are facts “beyond the reach of human concepts”—“facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings”—and that we might (like Justices Blackmun and Douglas) be compelled to recognize their existence without being able to state or comprehend them.28 Such inaccessible facts elude propositions expressed in human language. This is where the metaphorical language of the poets enters the picture (the language of philosophy when it goes beyond itself). All we need is the capacity to envisage another “point of touching things  |  67

view”—a spatial adjustment well fitted to understanding bats, since it comes into play whenever we try to understand the experiences of others, or even our own experience. In a crucial footnote, Nagel suggests hopefully that it may be possible “to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination.”29 The blind, he points out, often use a form of perception that resembles sonar (taps, clicks, and echoes); it may be just a matter of a continuum on the range of perceptual difference. We could say the same of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, given our inevitably partial understanding of other people’s experience. For Nagel, however, the point is not (as it might be for a poet) that “the imagination is remarkably flexible” or even that there might be an ethical imperative to employ it as a means of understanding others. Rather, any conception of what it is like to be a bat depends on our taking up the bat’s point of view, which we can never really do. The bat becomes an object lesson in the (im)possibility of knowing about ourselves and our others—any others. The bat occupies the position in Nagel’s argument of the obstacles to knowing what it is like to “be us” (not just “me”), that is, to be “in common.” His argument implicitly links cognition to perceptual experience, but it also implies that whatever can be said about the subjectivity of the animate world (or—by extension—the inanimate world) could also be said about human subjectivity. We simply do not know enough about it, let alone about each other. Wordsworth’s “Spirit in the woods” returns in the guise of a hidden life that is extended, like Psyche’s. Imagining the point of view of a mutilated bower, “Nutting” performs a similar thoughtexperiment. It extends the realm of knowledge and imagination to the unknown mode of  being of a silent wood. Continuing this line of thought, Wordsworth’s language of touch suggests that a physical event might be conceived as a mental event—not only for the impassioned nutter but for the mutilated bower. Nagel’s thoughtexperiment is designed to explore the problem of  how mental events are related to physical events or states of  body (the classic mind-body problem). The special case addressed by Wordsworth’s poem—that of inanimate, organic nature (Nature’s Spirit)—is unexpectedly broached in a footnote where Nagel defines what he means by imagining something “sympathetically”: To imagine something sympathetically, we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the thing itself. . . . Where the imagination of  physical features is perceptual and the imagination of mental features is sympathetic, it appears to us that we can imagine any experience occurring without 68  |  chapter three

its associated brain state, and vice versa. The relation between them will appear contingent even if it is necessary, because of the independence of the disparate types of imagination.30 Nagel seems to suggest that one may identify with the experience of things by putting oneself into a state resembling the thing itself, but without actually undergoing the same experience. This split, which separates mental events from physical states, is precisely analogous to the one that Wordsworth, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, calls “emotion recollected in tranquility”— his working definition of poetry. Freud calls it “negation,” or the origins of thinking: imagining a thing (a mother, for instance) or a perception in its absence.31 Nagel closes by speculating about the gap between subjective and objective that bypasses the problematic relation between mind and brain. Since we are currently unequipped to think about the subjective experience of others without taking up the point of view of the experiencing subject, he replaces his original question (“What is it like to be a bat?”) with another: what would an objective phenomenology be like that is not dependent on empathy or imagination? We could begin, he suggests, with humans rather than bats. Understanding ourselves by means of better or more selfevidently objective concepts would be the first step to engaging with the problem of other minds. Nagel tips his ethical hand in a final footnote: “If one understood how subjective experience could have an objective nature, one would understand the existence of subjects other than oneself.”32 Such an understanding would potentially include subjects that were nonhuman: the otherness of things. If others are truly other, and not just figures of resemblance based on ourselves—that is, on the model of the human—then the natural world ceases to be any different from the human world. A bat, a boy, or a nut would all be equally other for the poet.

The Standing of Trees “Panpsychism” (Nagel’s companion essay to “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”) wonders how one might “ever get from the mental states of whole animals back to the proto-mental properties of dead matter.” Does Wordsworth’s Lucy, rolled round with rocks and stones and trees, have mental properties? In Nagel’s words, “It is a kind of breakdown we cannot envision, perhaps it is unintelligible.”33 Panpsychism is another name for Wordsworth’s nowunfashionable philosophy of nature, the so-called One Life. In The Prelude, touching things  |  69

the young Wordsworth gives a moral life to natural forms, including rocks and stones (“I saw them feel, / Or link’d them to some feeling”).34 Even as an adult, he confesses: “I would not strike a flower / As many a man will strike his horse.”35 Pantheism, pacifism, and the language of ecopolitics converge. A ban on striking flowers might be dismissed as a symptom of  undue anxiety about violence masquerading as exquisite tenderness toward the vegetable world. From this point of view, flower abuse would merely constitute an extension along a fanciful continuum, setting no limits to the realm of feeling for things. It is a poetic stroke. Having a feeling for the organism defines environmentalism—an ethics predicated not simply on the survival of our own species or compassion for animals (or even flowers) but on respect for living organisms whose capacity to flourish may be damaged beyond repair by human carelessness, mismanagement, or deliberate injury. Contemporary philosophers have dedicated significant efforts to the question of justice for nonhuman animals. For instance, Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006) includes animals in her “capabilities” approach to justice. One item on her list of central human capabilities reads: “Other species: Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.”36 But the capability involved here is androcentric rather than pertaining to plants or trees. It makes a realistic assessment of the capability that humans possess to conserve, as a good, the well-being of the natural world in which they live. To live without such capability is to be deprived of the environmental concern of which humans are capable, as distinct from their own self-interest or survival. Nussbaum is an Aristotelian (and for Aristotle the world is sentient all the way down to mollusks)—but only up to a point; she recognizes, for instance, that it may be a big-cat capability to hunt gazelles, but she playfully suggests rubber balls as a solution to interspecies injustice. Her concern with justice across species barriers leads her to reject not only the Judeo-Christian idea of absolute human dominion over animals and plants but more specifically a contract-based Rawlsian form of justice from which both animals and environment are excluded, since neither are capable of entering into contracts. An ethical human compassion leads to the mitigation of suffering. But does that ethic, that compassion, include the sufferings of plants and trees? In Should Trees Have Standing? Stone distinguishes his claims for the environment from “anything so silly as that no one should be allowed to cut down a tree.”37 The bottom line, for Nussbaum, is the idea that a living creature with the capability for activities that are valuable or good is deprived 70  |  chapter three

of the opportunity to exercise them. Whether or not Aristotle would have extended this premise to trees, an ethical concern for living organisms certainly crosses species boundaries. For Nussbaum, the sympathetic imagination is key. Her insistence on the role of literature in educating the ethical imagination goes with a belief that imaginative writing motivates opposition to the sufferings of animals: “All of our ethical life involves, in this sense, an element of projection, a going beyond the facts as they are given.”38 Not surprisingly, she cites J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999)—a book that also draws on Nagel’s essay—for the idea that sympathy allows us to cross the species barrier and share the being of others.39 Both Coetzee and his fictional character (or alter ego) have been diagnosed as possessed by a mad form of ecosympathy that erases the difference between human and animal and, along with it, the difference between the Holocaust and the meat industry. Perhaps Elizabeth Costello’s despairing commitment to animal rights is Coetzee’s way of asking: how far can we go? Is there a limit to our ability to enter into a fictional character’s viewpoint, and if so, is it matched by our inability to enter into the lives of animals? This is Nagel’s question, turned around and readdressed to the novelist, who has constantly to imagine the lives of others and persuade or fail to persuade the reader to do the same. How then are we to respond to Nussbaum’s confident assertion that imaginative literature is ideally fitted to address issues of dignity, compassion, and justice?—or to her argument that these issues extend beyond the human world? Nussbaum is the first to admit that her answers will not satisfy ecological thinkers. Since it pertains to political justice, damage to the environment constitutes a different inquiry altogether. But the thwarting or blighting of natural capabilities (including biodiversity) raises questions about the extent of human intervention. What sylvan environment is fully natural? A healthy wood is managed by clearance and coppicing, as well as by storms and natural decay. The impassioned nutter is engaged in just such an act of human management at the meeting point of nature and culture: harvesting nuts. As Nussbaum concedes (citing Darwin), human beings are not “sharply set off from the rest of nature” and “capabilities crisscross and overlap.”40 Many a hidden ecosystem would fail to thrive without some form of human intervention, and none is immune to evolutionary change. “Just leaving nature as it is” is not an option; mitigating natural depredation may be crucial to preserving biodiversity. Nussbaum is firmly on the side of J. S. Mill when she refuses to Romanticize nature, calling instead for “the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just.”41 Rephrased as “the ethical,” touching things  |  71

that call could provide an alternative gloss on Wordsworth’s “Nutting.” For Nussbaum, conflict between different capabilities is a sign that all is not well in the world we inhabit. Yet to think that the nut gatherer is in conflict with the nut bower is a stretch; this is just a bit of  youthful nut gathering, after all. Nussbaum is compelled to acknowledge “an ineliminable residue of tragedy in the relationship between humans and animals.”42 Wordsworth’s poem seems similarly to suggest that there is an ineliminable residue of tragedy or, at any rate, suffering in the relation between humans and woods. Perhaps we have reached the bottom line: the incompatibility of human and natural ecologies creates a no-win situation. Recent Heideggerian ecocriticism foregrounds the problem that Nuss­ baum sidesteps. Respect for things predicated on their being in the world (as Nancy points out) implies a heliotropic touch of the sun. Drawing on Heidegger, the philosopher John Llewelyn addresses the relation between ontological responsibility and the poetry of nature. For Llewelyn, poetry’s evocation of the aesthetic beauty of nature provides a path toward recognizing that nature deserves to be both thought and thought about— respected, valued, and preserved from harm. Citing Hölderlin, he argues that nature is an aspect of all things; the human and natural are united even as poetry emphasizes their otherness. Llewelyn’s conception of the thing is Heideggerian—“a conception of what we might call ontological responsibility that a human might have toward a jug or a tree but that a jug or a tree could not have toward a human being.”43 This sounds familiar. He asks whether such a form of responsibility is letting be (Seinlassen) or letting belong (Gehörenlassen). The capacity for letting be or for letting belong is what demarcates the human from the nonhuman. For Llewelyn, it is a balancing act. To elicit “an ecologically broadened understanding of responsibility” requires not just giving being its due but doing justice to beings without anthropomorphizing the thing.44 Heidegger does seem to anthropomorphize when he suggests that the nonhuman can be solicitous. On the other hand, he differentiates between the thinking thing and the nonthinking thing, and hence between the letting be and letting belong that distinguish thinking from nonthinking being. The concept of Gelassenheit (letting be) is apposite to “Nutting,” which states that the bower patiently gives up its “quiet being.” The bower has not been let be: its uncertain “being” is what it gives up. Paradoxically, it is the use of poetic language to endow a thing with spirit that establishes the difference between human and nonhuman. But poet and nature do not share a 72  |  chapter three

common anthropomorphism. Indeed, in Llewelyn’s reading of Heidegger, Gelassenheit specifically prohibits anthropomorphism. The mortal poet is the one who gives being to mortal and nonmortal forms of nature, permitting the natural to function as a crossing point between the two—as a point of convergence or bridge for the fourfold nature of the Heideggerian thing: earth and sky, mortal and immortal. Hölderlin’s gods come and go across this bridge, with the poet acting as mediator. This Romantic and Heideggerian view of the poet’s role has obvious resonances with the “greening” of  Wordsworth. As Jonathan Bate writes in The Song of the Earth (2000), summarizing Heidegger, “By disclosing the being of entities in language, the poet lets them be.”45 Elsewhere, however, he is less sanguine, proffering his own version of the myth of the Mutilated Bower: “The poem is a clearing in that it is an opening to the nature of  being. . . . But such a clearing can only be achieved through a dividing and destroying.”46 But perhaps there is another way to read this division. The second self (Maiden or sister), who reads the poetic landscape better than the impetuous boy had done, resembles the second poet in the doubled ending of “Tintern Abbey.” Here the poet’s benediction makes his walking companion a future self, just as it makes “this green pastoral landscape . . . / More dear” (ll. 159–60). What one might call the (more) “dearing” of nature (the dearing of  Maiden, nook, and pastoral landscape) allows “Nutting” to be read as a mode of thinking about the being of things—an ontologically responsible thinking—that is both retrospective (hence melancholy) and constitutive of a distinctively Wordsworthian ecopoiesis. Access to the bower’s “quiet being” is granted to a future reader or sister, second poets shaped by their shared and reduplicated poetic encounter. The demarcation between thinking about nature and a nature that is unable to think is crossed in this chiastic moment—unless, of course, the Maiden is on the side of nature and no more in possession of  her consciousness than Psyche. The question then becomes, not “Can woods (or women) think?” but “Can the poem think?” Can a poem suffer intrusion, or can the poet suffer on its behalf? The impersonality of the poem resembles the quiet being of the bower: unable to speak for itself, it is read, is reread, and becomes dearer (greener) in the rehearsal. A poem is like a bat—without any way to be, or be like, other than in terms of its repeated self-experience. We glimpse the outline of  another small mammal: the hedgehog that is Derrida’s playful trope for the poem in “Che cos’è la poesia?” (1988).47 “What thing is poetry?” addresses the question of the poem in the form of a small rebarbative organism whose only defense is touching things  |  73

to turn itself into a ball, preventing intrusion from the outside. The hérisson or (Italian) istrice bristles with questions: What [kind of] thing is poetry? Ti esti? Was ist? These questions can be answered only in their own terms—by the elliptical wanderings of metaphor or (as Derrida suggests) “by heart,” that is, affectively, playfully. Derrida’s carefully crafted essay protests against the flattening of the literary by the juggernaut of paraphrase. It anticipates a catastrophe (being run down by a heavy prosaic vehicle while crossing the road); yet it repels intrusion by the sheer resistance of the poetic, including the heartbeat of metrical language, and by its refusal of a Heideggerian absolute or abstract truth. Like the stone, it is grounded in and partakes of the sense world, located at the crossing point of istoria, episteme, and philosophia. Its accidental translation into prose is the catastrophe avoided by Derrida’s tactful handling of the question and his hands-off approach to poetry. In her essay “Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis,” Kate Rigby asks whether poetry’s homocentrism intrudes on the natural world as the mark of the all-too-human. She takes issue with Jonathan Bate’s utopian melancholy in The Song of the Earth when he writes that “if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth.”48 Rigby argues instead that “we must first encounter the absence or obscurity of a place before we can begin to attune ourselves to it in dwelling.”49 Compare “Nutting,” where the “silent trees” discompose the intruder. Even late Heideggerian philosophy is criticized by Rigby for the “arrogant assumption of human apartness” implied by its fixation on language as the horizon of understanding; the logos becomes the site where “the otherwise undisclosed being of things is revealed.”50 For Heidegger, language—our threshold of understanding—is where being dwells. The way in which nature, lacking language, nonetheless addresses us remains unfathomable, even if nature’s prior self-disclosure is what calls the poet into song. Jonathan Bate (reading Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy) writes that “things need us so that they can be named.”51 The anthropocentricism of this poetic rescue complex celebrates the human prerogative of language in its Edenic mode. But it does so by ignoring other kinds of semiotic process. This is not to say that the mutilated bower addresses us in any but a textual voice. But even silence can be a mode of communication. Rigby argues for an ecopoiesis that does not disclose what is unsayable or inexpressible in nature but that instead draws attention to its own status as poetry by “disclosing the nonequation of word and thing, poem and place.”52 If we dwell anywhere, it is with the fragile poetics of nonequivalence and negative poetics, where a poem is not a tree. 74  |  chapter three

Woods, etc. In The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), Lawrence Buell directs attention to first-wave ecocriticism’s resistance to anthropocentricism: its attempt to eliminate the human figure from the imaginary landscape. Some versions of pastoral environmentalism have adopted the idea of “deep ecology,” or what the Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess calls “the relational, total field-image” where all organisms are equal (“knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations”).53 Such radical ecocentrism (which has Heideggerian affinities, but from the left rather than the right) has been redefined as a recognition of the interdependence of human and nonhuman, a relational web with no divide between living and nonliving. One extension of this holistic understanding of deep ecology would be to pursue Nussbaum’s capabilities argument into the area that she herself resists: justice is justice for all organisms, not just for human or animal life. But a program of environmental justice involving a halt to human encroachment on the natural world (via population control, or a ban on nut gathering) would be hard to implement and anyway risks being accused of ecofascism. A more acceptable program in the aesthetic realm might be what Bate calls the unrealizable “dream of a deep ecology,” or “thought-experiments and language-experiments which imagine . . . a reintegration of the human and the Other.”54 Seductive as this utopian dream of reintegration may be, however, it refuses the nonequivalence that linguistic and philosophic poststructuralism have taught us. I want to return in closing to Merleau-Ponty, whose embodied perception offers a phenomenological alternative to Heideg­ gerian dwelling, while insisting that touch is neither mutual, reflexive, nor contingent. The Wordsworthian landscape is inhabited and changed by human consciousness, as well as by consciousness of the nonhuman: this much we know. His figures exist in a landscape; both mind and body are “emplaced” (Buell’s term)—but not necessarily in sync. The One Mind is never quite at one, never quite living, unless laid asleep, although it may imminently or immanently become so. Landscape and human, mind and body, intrude on one another, precluding deep ecology’s dream of reintegration.55 In On Touching, Derrida returns to “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” the speculative last chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964).56 Revealing its hidden countermovement, Derrida effectively undermines the idea of an ecopoetics grounded on subjective touching things  |  75

experience, bodily emplacement, or perceptual situatedness. As Derrida points out, Merleau-Ponty’s discursive dependence on the figure of the human hand involves a form of anthropology, or what he terms “humanualism.” For Merleau-Ponty, “touching of the touch” provides “an opening upon a tactile world” that is confined to humans: This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it; the two systems are applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange.57 What does it feel like to be a hand—or an orange, for that matter? MerleauPonty calls this “veritable touching of the touch” the threshold where “the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.” In this crossing or chiasm, “the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things.”58 How touching (things) and the things touched are hinged, but do not coincide, is the phenomenological fold inhabited by what Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh.” A hidden fleshly hinge, “solid and unshakeable,” spans “this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching.” Ontological presence bridges the void of nonbeing—“spanned by the total being of my body, and by that of the world.”59 Derrida’s reading hones this fold where ontology is disjoined from metaphor, and touch disjoined from thought. The ubiquitous “figure of touch” emerges as a double figure—both “contact and noncontact.”60 Taking as his text Merleau-Ponty’s pregnant remark about Bergson (“it is a non-coincidence I coincide with here”), Derrida argues that his declarations about the coinciding of sentient and sensible, or “immediate coincidence,” are accompanied by “an increasingly insistent discourse about all the phenomena of noncoincidence or even noncontact with the untouchable.”61 Merleau-Ponty’s “intuitionism of the flesh” emphasizes originary immediacy, sensible presentation, and coperception. Yet, Derrida points out, it simultaneously reveals an equally intuitionist reinscription of “an experience of apartness, inadequacy, distance, indirection, noncoincidence.”62 Even the maiden’s “gentle hand” can never coincide with things; apartness already dwells with the bower. 76  |  chapter three

Touching and thinking (like seeing and vision) are never far apart for Merleau-Ponty, for whom the figurative meaning of  vision is already “a sublimation of the flesh, which will be mind or thought.”63 If thought is a relationship with one’s self-experience and with the world, it is always subject to the pressure of a double discourse: both immediate coincidence (phenomenology) and the noncoincidence of Derrida’s negative poetics—the poetics of absence. Derrida wants to uphold the Husserlian principle that we have access to the world only via representations, projections, and introjections. Touch means nothing without thought, but thought never coincides exactly with touch. Nor is it a matter of saying that “the touched-touching junction is made by Thought or Consciousness.”64 Derrida calls this ever-imminent coincidence that always misses or miscarries “the untouchable.” In a speculative note, Merleau-Ponty refers to the untouchable as “a true negative”: The touching is never exactly the touched. This does not mean that they coincide “in the mind” or at the level of “consciousness.” Something else than the body is needed for the junction to be made: it takes place in the untouchable. That of the other which I will never touch. But what I will never touch, he does not touch either, no privilege of oneself over the other here, it is therefore not the consciousness that is the untouchable. . . . The untouchable is not a touchable in fact inaccessible—the unconscious is not a representation in fact inaccessible. The negative here is not a positive that is elsewhere (a transcendent)—it is a true negative.65 The untouchable becomes “an original of the elsewhere, a Selbst that is an Other.”66 Like the inside-out glove (thanks to Lacan, the best known of all Merleau-Ponty’s manual figures), thought itself is defined as nonreversibility and noncoincidence. I want to end with the title poem of Alice Oswald’s collection Woods etc. Oswald, like Wordsworth, is a poet for whom nature, language, and thought are differentiated. They do not coincide, although the mind may wish them to do so. Whatever the silent trees of “Nutting” might have said remains imminent rather than uttered. Nature’s unheard semiotics correspond to a wound in consciousness—an opening or threshold, measured by the steady footfalls and half-heard rhymes of Oswald’s poem as its metrical form organizes “loose tacks of sound” into meaning. Here is “Woods etc.”: footfall, which is a means so steady and in small sections wanders through the mind touching things  |  77

unnoticed, because it beats constantly, sweeping together the loose tacks of sound I remember walking once into increasing woods, my hearing like a widening wound. first your voice and then the resulting ceasing. the last glow of rain dead in the ground that my feet kept time with the sun’s imaginary changing position, hoping it would rise suddenly from scattered parts of my body into the upturned apses of my eyes. no clearing in that quiet, no change at all. in my throat the little mercury line that regulates my speech began to fall rapidly the endless length of my spine67 This walk into increasing woods is also an incursion by sound into silence: the being of entities disclosed in language. Footfalls keep time with an imagined solar movement. In a moment of sacralism, eyes become apses, turned upward to receive and house (worship?) scattered sunlight. The body pays tribute to the being of the wood. Oswald’s last stanza contains the link with Wordsworth’s “Nutting” that I am intent on making: “no clearing in that quiet, no change at all.” The silence that falls in the poem—its refusal to acknowledge any change despite human intrusion—is figured as a falling column of mercury (the line of poetry). Stilled, the human thermometer is as cold-blooded as a sap-filled tree, subject to the same sylvan weather effects. Stay cool: speech is a fever; get in touch with your inner tree. Wordsworth’s “Nutting” reminds us that there is a Spirit in the woods: Oswald’s “Woods etc.” finds the woods within the spirit if we can only see them for the trees. I am not sure that I have fully understood Oswald’s poem or even communicated what I do understand in the nonequivalence of prose. But I think its modern ecopoetics approximates remarkably to Wordsworth’s injunction to the Maiden: “move along these shades / In gentleness of heart” (ll. 52–53). What is untouchable in Wordsworth’s trees and silenced in Oswald’s woods never entirely coincides with phenomenology or self-experience, with thought or with language. The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees. 78  |  chapter three

chapter 4

Composing Sound the de af dalesman, “the brother s,” and epitaphic signs And yon tall Pine-tree, whose composing sound Was wasted on the good Man’s living ear, Hath now its own peculiar sanctity; And at the touch of every wandering breeze Murmurs not idly o’er his peaceful grave. — William Wordsworth, Essays upon Epitaphs1 Oh silence, independent of a stopped ear, You observe birds, flying, sing with wings instead. — David Wright, “Monologue of a Deaf Man”2

T

he pine tree’s “composing sound” in Wordsworth’s epitaph for the deaf Dalesman, at the end of the third and last of the essays in Essays upon Epitaphs, has been read as the defining instance of his epitaphic mode. For de Man, “the sad privation” (l. 582) stoically endured by the Dalesman—“the story of a deaf man who compensates for his infirmity by substituting the reading of books for the sounds of nature”—is the condition imposed by writing as it silences voice.3 Using the deaf Dalesman as his exemplary autobiographical text, de Man interprets the privation of deafness, along with disabilities and accidents that include muteness, mutilation, blindness, and drowning, as a figure for the dangerous autobiographical enterprise glimpsed in The Prelude at moments when “a sudden shock . . . interrupts a state of affairs that was relatively stable.”4 I want to suggest a different approach to the auditory effects that murmur “not idly” in Wordsworth’s poetry, situating them within late eighteenthcentury debates about the education of the deaf. These debates coincided with Enlightenment redefinitions of  the human, a category expanded to embrace the deaf—previously regarded as uneducable automata—along with 79

the mad, the disabled, the primitive, and the child. During the same period, Enlightenment philosophers and educators also came to view deaf signing as a human system of communication that did not conform to graphic conventions such as writing. What is at stake is not just the familiar opposition between speech and writing but a visual sign-system specific to the deaf, yet imagined as universally accessible. In addition, the phenomenology of reading as experienced by the deaf serves to break down distinctions between deafness and hearing, so that hearing itself becomes an ambiguous category. The Dalesman’s epitaph goes to the heart of this double and enlarged understanding of deafness as both silence and hearing, muteness and communicative signing.

Eye-Music Wordsworth’s verses on Thomas Holme (d. 1773), the original for the deaf Dalesman, were inspired by “a concise epitaph which [he] met with some time ago in one of the most retired vales among the Mountains of West­ moreland” (Mardale churchyard, at the head of  Hawesdale): “He Was De­ prived Of The Sense Of Hearing / In His Youth And Lived About 50 Years / Without The Comfort Of Hearing One Word / He Reconciled Himself To His Misfortune By Reading And Useful Employment / Was Very Temperate Honest And Peaceable / He Was Well Respected By His Neighbours And / Relations And De­ parted This Life After A Short / Sickness On The 22d Of March 1773 Aged 67 Years.”5 In The Excursion, book 7 (“The Church-yard among the Mountains, continued”), the story of the deaf Dalesman is paired with that of a blind man. Wordsworth represents deafness as a condition of sight absolutely deprived of sound—a condition that does not necessarily tally with the experience of the postlingually deaf, as we shall see. In The Pre­ lude, he writes of places marked by what had been done or suffered there as “thronged with impregnations,” like the wild places of his childhood, whose “audible seclusions . . . into music touch the passing wind” (Prel. 8.794–96). The world of the deaf Dalesman, by contrast, lacks the “touch” of natural music: “this deep mountain valley was to him / Soundless, with all its streams” (ll. 510–11). Unable to hear rousing cocks, shouting cuckoos, murmuring bees, or stormy winds, he inhabits a mute pictorial world: “The agitated scene before his eye / Was silent as a picture” (ll. 520–21). Silent, but not motionless. A revealing parallel can be found in the testi80  |  chapter four

mony of the twentieth-century poet and translator David Wright. Like the Dalesman, Wright became deaf during childhood. But for him “the world a deaf man inhabits is not one of compete silence”; or at any rate, “the world in which I live seldom appears silent. . . . In my case, silence is not absence of sound but of movement.” As he goes on to explain, citing Wordsworth’s poetry: Suppose it is a calm day, absolutely still, not a twig or leaf stirring. To me it will seem quiet as a tomb though hedgerows are full of noisy but invisible birds. Then comes a breath of air, enough to unsettle a leaf; I will see and hear that movement like an exclamation. The illusory soundlessness has been interrupted. I see, as if I heard, a visionary noise of wind in a disturbance of foliage. Wordsworth in a late poem exactly caught the phenomenon in a remarkable line: A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs . . . The “sound” seen by me is not necessarily equivalent to the real one. It must often be close enough, in my case helped by a subliminal memory of things once heard. I cannot watch a gale without “hearing” an uproar of violent movement: trees thrashing, grassblades staggering like all-in wrestlers—this kind of thing comes through as hubbub enough. On the other hand I also live in a world of sounds which are, as I know quite well, imaginary because non-existent. Yet for me they are part of reality. I have sometimes to make a deliberate effort to remember I am not “hearing” anything, because there is nothing to hear.6 Wright continues: “Such non-sounds include the flight and movement of birds,” which “appears audible, each species creating a different ‘eye-music.’” To regain his hearing would resemble a second disability: like a hermit crab in its shell, he has learned to be at home with his deafness. Wright’s testimony is at odds with Wordsworth’s representation of the Dalesman’s deafness. For Wright, despite the silencing of birdsong, a visual form of “sound” creates an exclamatory moving world. Wright’s quotation comes from Wordsworth’s “Airey-Force Valley,” a late blank-verse fragment of 1835 that describes suspended animation, “Where all things else are still and motionless” (l. 7) except for the stream and the slightest breeze: . . . to its gentle touch how sensitive Is the light ash! that, pendent from the brow Of yon dim cave, in seeming silence makes A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs, composing sound  |  81

Powerful almost as vocal harmony To stay the wanderer’s steps and soothe his thoughts. (ll. 11–16)7 The “seeming silence” and “soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs” is perceived both alliteratively and visually: “Powerful almost as vocal harmony.” The stilled landscape is “almost ” vocal, since movement is rendered as a concert of semi-audible eye-music—or as poetry itself: audible eye-music to an internal ear.8 In the deaf Dalesman’s epitaph, however, the agitated movement of  waves, trees, and clouds—worked, rocked, or driven by stormy winds—remains as stilled and silent as if he had been born congenitally deaf. The soundless nature inhabited by the Dalesman becomes a metaphor for the isolation often associated with prelingual deafness: “He grew up / From year to year in loneliness of soul” (ll. 508–9). Until the middle of the eighteenth century, congenital or prelingual deafness consigned the individual to muteness. In his soundless world, the Dalesman is “upheld” by “the solace of his own calm thoughts” (ll. 523–24). Thus upheld, he labors for its own sake, without desire for ownership or accumulation: “neither field nor flock he owned, / No wish for wealth had place within his mind” (ll. 531–32). Lacking a family of his own (“Nor husband’s love, nor father’s hope or care”; l. 533), he lives contentedly with his parents and later with his older brother, “An inmate of a second family” (l. 541). Home (Holme) is somewhere he never leaves. He inhabits this preternatural familiar calm much as Wright inhabits the carapace of deafness. Unroused by cockcrow, undelighted by cuckoos, unmoved by storms or desires, he is guided by duty and sustained by the seasonal activities of Lake District farming. But the deaf Dalesman is also a reader. Reading, like extended childhood—or premature death—compensates his “introverted spirit” for loss of hearing. Predicated on visual signs and rapid eye movement, reading constitutes a form of eye-music (almost) as powerful as vocal harmony; the look of poetry on the page is an aspect of its unheard music. For the lonely Dalesman, “From whom in early childhood was with­ drawn / The precious gift of hearing” (ll. 507–8), books are a substitute community. De Man remarks that the reason the deaf Dalesman takes to books so readily is that “for him the outside world has in fact always been a book”—not so much a picture book as “a succession of  voiceless tropes.”9 As we have seen, this is not strictly accurate (the deaf Dalesman has not always been deaf, nor is his relation to what he sees strictly tropological). But deaf 82  |  chapter four

literacy was unusual at least until midcentury, so the Dalesman’s reading implies a special tribute to the literacy of his Lake District community. Books hold the promise of an idealized sociality: books Were ready comrades whom he could not tire,— Of whose society the blameless Man Was never satiate. Their familiar voice, Even to old age, with unabated charm Beguiled his leisure hours; refreshed his thoughts; Beyond its natural elevation raised His introverted spirit; and bestowed Upon his life an outward dignity Which all acknowledged. (ll. 545–54) The Dalesman’s library—“Song of the muses, sage historic tale, / Science severe, or work of holy writ” (ll. 556–57)—conforms to the outlines of Wordsworth’s own reading in The Prelude. Books promise “immortality and joy . . . From imperfection and decay secure” (ll. 558–60). The Dalesman is redeemed even before his death, assured of the tranquility and equanimity of literary afterlife—hence “his peaceful smiles, / The gleams of his slowvarying countenance” (ll. 566–67). The unobtrusive manner of his dying— the powers of Nature are “insensibly consumed” (l. 570)—marks a change of degree rather than kind; “the profounder stillness of the grave” (l. 574) is continuous with his stilled life. The composing sound that “Murmurs not idly o’er the peaceful grave” (l. 587) accompanies this insensible merging of life and death. The Dalesman’s literacy restores “The precious gift of hearing,” but at a cost. Books converse with the introverted spirit like an undead family. Redemption by reading ensures an afterlife; yet the ear of the deaf is imagined as that of the already dead. In a sonnet sequence of 1804, “I am not One who much or oft delight” (“Personal Talk”), Wordsworth declares that he much prefers reading to fireside gossip: “Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, / Are a substantial world, both pure and good” (ll. 33– 34).10 Offering a Holme-like glimpse of  his own domestic hearth—“There do I find a never-failing store / Of personal themes” (ll. 37–38)—Wordsworth attributes his best sources not to fireside gossip but to books. Solitary reading defends against a hostile or persecutory world, ensuring “Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought” (l. 48). Blessing “The Poets, composing sound  |  83

who on earth have made us Heirs / Of  truth and pure delight,” Wordsworth writes himself optimistically into the dead poets’ society: “Oh! Might my name be numbered among theirs, / Then gladly would I end my mortal days” (ll. 53–54, 55–56). His inclusion in this imaginary community of poets links him to the election of the deaf Dalesman, who, even before his death, joins the ranks of “the assembled spirits of the just” (l. 559). Reading involves a kind of deaf-muteness. Historians of literacy argue that silent reading became increasingly common during the eighteenth century, accompanying the expansion of print culture.11 Reciting his own “poetic numbers” at the start of The Prelude, Wordsworth is cheered when he hears both his own voice and “the mind’s / Internal echo of the imperfect sound” (Prel. 1.64–65). Deciphering epitaphs during a visit to the church in The Excursion, the Poet whispers them out loud: “to the silent language giving voice, / I read” (Excursion, 5.187–88). This auditory doubling also forms part of the experience of the postlingual deaf.12 Whether or not Wordsworth sounded his poetry as he composed, the evidence of the murmuring pine tree and of the whispered epitaphs of The Excursion suggests that he may have sounded poetry, internally and “With whisper soft,” as he read by hearth or graveside.13 What are the implications of this auditory doubling for the realm of silent signing? I want to explore this question by way of Enlightenment writing on deaf education that poses issues about literacy and signing—issues still relevant today. These issues also speak more generally to the status of signs in Wordsworth’s poetry.

A Second Horn-Book Wordsworth calls the epitaph “a second horn-book” where learning to read begins again.14 Eighteenth-century debates about educating the deaf—no longer considered incurable imbeciles—are bound up with Enlightenment philosophies of language.15 The late eighteenth-century movement for deaf education involved a tug-of-war between those who advocated teaching the deaf by using their own gestural sign-system and those who believed that the deaf should be “given” a voice by being taught to speak. On the one hand, deaf educators championed autonomous signing practices that had grown up among deaf communities themselves. On the other, their opponents believed that deaf-mutes should be brought within the oral sphere of the dominant hearing majority. The Enlightenment debate over deaf education involves the politics of integration: should the deaf be allowed 84  |  chapter four

to live and learn in their own world? Or should they be integrated as far as possible into the oral mainstream and taught to speak? Or, a third possibility, should the deaf be considered bilingual—fluent in two languages, both signing and spoken? Among the most effective (and vocal) proponents of deaf education were two French Enlightenment near contemporaries of the deaf Dalesman himself.16 Both had been helped to overcome their deafness by pioneering educators, at least one of  whom—the abbé de l’Épée—would have been well known in late eighteenth-century Britain. Saboureux de Fontenay was presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1751 as a deaf-mute who had successfully learned to speak. His teacher was Jacob Pereire, who developed a system for countering the mutism that accompanies congenital deafness by adapting a seventeenthcentury Spanish manual alphabet for use in French as a form of fingerspelling (also used for communicating with the blind by touch). Under his tuition, Saboureux became not only literate but the first person born deaf who went on to publish a book. His Lettre de M. Saboureux de Fontenay, sourd et muet de naissance, à Mademoiselle *** (1764) insists on the unimpeded communicativeness of pictures: “at the sight of a picture, the eyes, rightly called the mirror of the soul, communicate to the deaf person the whole thought of the person who painted it (by writing or fingerspelling or signs or whatever means), much as his mind imagined it . . . the thought goes from the person imagining it to the person receiving it.”17 Picture-writing mediates the communication of thought between mind and mind. Saboureux installs the deaf squarely within eighteenth-century print culture and the conversational public sphere: “you should recognize that print, signs, words, phrases, conversation, and the reading of books give deaf persons as much pleasure as hearing people get from the sounds of speech and conversation.”18 Alongside his laborious acquisition of speech, Saboureux had learned the specific writing-based system that Pereire called “dactylology”: “The hand is used like a pen for making drawings in the air of the periods and accent marks and to indicate the capitals and small letters and abbreviations. The finger movements mark the long, medium, and very short pauses observed in speech. Dactylology . . . is as rapid and convenient as speech itself, and as expressive as good writing. Other signs can be added freely to accommodate the rules of prosody, music, poetry, and the like.”19 Dactylology implies literacy in the most literal sense, promising access to music, prosody, and poetry. Saboureux’s advocacy of a graphic system derived from both writing and speech aligns him with the so-called oralist composing sound  |  85

camp that rejected the use of deaf sign language altogether. Rival proponents of deaf education, by contrast, supported manualism, a self-sufficient sign-system independent of  fingerspelling or dactylology. Pierre Desloges, for instance, vigorously defends the autonomous signing world of the deaf in his Observations d’un sourd et muet (1779), responding to a publication denigrating sign language by another of Pereire’s supporters: the abbé Deschamps’s Cours élémentaire d’éducation des sourds et muets (1779) required deaf-mutes to use their mouths to imitate the mechanics of speech and to learn to lip-read the mouths of the hearing. Desloges (like the deaf Dalesman) had become deaf in childhood, but only after he had learned to read and write. His knowledge of sign language initially came through contact with an illiterate underclass; prior to that, his only form of self-­expression had been writing. As an adult, he discovered the signing language used by the deaf community of urban Paris and adopted for teaching by the saintly abbé de l’Épée, the most esteemed of all Enlightenment pioneers of deaf education. De l’Épée’s support of signing reflected his belief that deaf language was an autonomous system resembling the “native” or “natural” language of another nation—a potentially universal language intelligible to all peoples and one that constituted a living dictionary of signs.20 His fantasy of a universal sign language was, of course, unfounded; deaf language systems are as culturally, ethnically, and nationally varied as oral languages. But signing proved invaluable for teaching the deaf, and it remains linked to high levels of  literacy and educational achievement even today.21 Desloges argued that the deaf inhabit a compensatory world whose privations enhance attentiveness and encourage reflection. He represents deaf signing as a specialized means of communication that “being a faithful image of the object expressed, is singularly appropriate for making our ideas accurate and for extending our comprehension. . . . This language is lively; it portrays sentiment, and develops the imagination. No other language is more appropriate for conveying great and strong emotions.”22 Citing Condillac’s linguistic theories, Desloges posits the existence of a language that “represents or recalls the idea of things by signs that are not arbitrary, but natural.”23 Deaf signing was at once more faithful to nature and more passionate than arbitrary signs. The abbé de l’Épée’s public demonstrations at his Paris school during the 1770s, along with his Veritable manière d’instruire les sourds et muets, confirmée par une longue experience (1784), helped to disseminate the international use of deaf signing.24 In his Cours d’instruction d’un sourd-muet de naissance (1803), the abbé Roch-Ambroise Sicard—de l’Épée’s successor—continued to advocate for the inclusion of the congeni86  |  chapter four

tally deaf in the category of the human: “Why is the uneducated deaf person isolated in nature and unable to communicate with other men? Why is he reduced to this state of imbecility?”25 The solution to ending this isolation lay in the pictorial dimensions of deaf sign language. Sicard—the enlightened overseer of the National Institute for DeafMutes, to which Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, was brought in 1800— planned to compile a dictionary of deaf language. Published as Théorie des signes (1808), it envisaged a gestural or “natural” sign language that was predicated on nonarbitrary signs “taken from the nature of the objects they represent.” Its figurative (i.e., pictorial) basis was capable of overcoming the muteness of nations, enabling them to converse with each other across national boundaries: “This figurative language even has a definite advantage over spoken language, for it is not restricted to any one dialect. It is a kind of universal language that, if well articulated, is understandable to people of every nationality. . . . Beyond its own territorial limits, every nation is mute, but the nation using gesture is nowhere mute. For this language is the language of nature and is to some degree spoken everywhere.”26 Whereas sounds largely derive their meaning from convention, the deaf person mimes objects “with a probably clearer and less ambiguous pantomime”; as in spoken language, analogies “enrich the mimic vocabulary of the deaf.”27 Thus imagined, mimetic sign language promised a universally intelligible language predicated on visual analogy. Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs champions the epitaph for its universality: “not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all—to the wise and the most ignorant.”28 The epitaph is a democratic form of reading matter, “concerning all, and for all,” that returns the old to childhood and lets the child take pride in reading. Even the sun gets a look-in: “its story and admonitions are brief, that the thoughtless, the busy, and indolent, may not be deterred, nor the impatient tired: the stooping old man cons the engraven record like a second horn-book;—the child is proud that he can read it;—and the stranger is introduced through its mediation to the company of a friend: it is concerning all, and for all:—in the church-yard it is open to the day; the sun looks down upon the stone, and the rains of  heaven beat against it.”29 In this environmentally friendly form of literacy, the sun is the universal reader that looks down on the weathered stone (“The large, overarching metaphor for this entire system”); the rain performs its tribute to a naturalized text.30 Commenting on the affecting figures and analogies of epitaphs, Wordsworth lists natural processes: life as a journey, death as a sleep, misfortune as a storm, beauty as a flower, virtue as a rock, hope undermined like a composing sound  |  87

poplar by the river that feeds it or blasted like a pine tree by lightning.31 One might add to this list the sun, the trope that de Man calls “more than a mere natural object . . . a figure of  knowledge as well as of nature.” This is “the eye that reads the text of the epitaph.”32 Mute nation becomes reading nation. Such graveyard analogies, Wordsworth speculates, must have given “to the language of the senseless stone a voice enforced and endeared by the benignity of that nature with which it was in unison.”33 Nature’s universally “figurative” language both gives a voice to the senseless stone and is united with it. As de Man puts it, “the speaking stone counterbalanc[es] the seeing sun”34—hence the rhetorical figure, prosopopoeia, that confers the power of speech, and whose phenomenological effects include “hearing” the voice of the epitaphic text. This figure allows the mute stone to speak while making every reader a natural reader. For de Man, the threat of a deeper logical disturbance emerges at this point: the trope that gives voice also signals its symmetrical opposite, muteness. I want, however, to take a different path. What are the implications of this mimetic theory of signs as natural analogy—figures “taken from the nature of the objects they represent”—for epitaphic narrative in Wordsworth’s “The Brothers”?

A Pair of Diaries The deaf Dalesman’s story belongs with other pastorals by Wordsworth that mourn the passing of the Lake District Statesmen (“men of respectable education who daily labour on their own little properties”). Anchoring them by domestic affections and inheritance, “their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written.”35 Wordsworth’s 1801 letter to Charles James Fox singles out “Michael” and “The Brothers”—the poem that he intended to open the 1800 two-volume Lyrical Ballads.36 His letter merges pastoral, inscription, and epitaph; landscape becomes the memorial “tablet” on which the Statesmen’s feelings are written. Geoffrey Hartman observes of this generic convergence, “Nature is herself a larger graveyard inscribed deeply with evidences of past life.”37 For the Priest of Ennerdale in “The Brothers,” nature is also God’s “great book of the world” (l. 262).38 Defending The Excursion, in 1815, Wordsworth refers to “the innumerable analogies . . . transfused into that Poem from the Bible of the Universe.” He ends: “Do not you perceive that my conversations almost all take place out of Doors, and all with grand objects of nature surrounding the speakers for the express purpose of their being alluded to in illustration of the subjects treated of.”39 Underpinned by 88  |  chapter four

religion, his illustrative mode treats landscape as a biblically authorized sign language. “The Brothers” was originally known as “the pastoral of Bowman.” It commemorates a tragedy that Wordsworth had learned about during his Lake District walking tour with Coleridge in the autumn of 1799.40 The opening lines of “The Brothers” contain an early usage of the word “tourist” when the Priest of Ennerdale mistakes Leonard Ewbank for a sentimental traveler: “These tourists, Heaven preserve us! Needs must live / A profitable life” (ll. 1–2). The Priest is puzzled, since there are no written epitaphs or tombstones to detain Leonard: —In our church-yard Is neither epitaph nor monument, Tomb-stone nor name, only the turf we tread, And a few natural graves. (ll. 12–15) The Essays upon Epitaphs recalls the halting of the passerby at “the invitation, ‘Pause, Traveller!’ so often found upon [classical] monuments.”41 Leonard— far from being the idle tourist for which the Priest mistakes him—is a halted traveler indeed, lingering beside an unmarked grave.42 Wordsworth’s own Lake tour had involved stories gleaned not only from gravestones but from the Dalesmen who taught him to read the landscape: “The poem arose out of the fact mentioned to me at Ennerdale that a shepherd had fallen asleep upon the top of the rock called The Pillar, and perished as here described, his staff being left midway on the rock.”43 “The Brothers” twins epitaphic landscape and communal memory. In the poem’s opening lines, the Priest describes satirically how tourists, recording the landscape in their sketchbooks or journals, “Sit perch’d, with book and pencil on their knee, / And look and scribble, scribble on and look” (ll. 6–7). “The Brothers” employs a similar mode of comparing landscape and sign. When Leonard comments on the absence of grave monuments, the Priest replies: “We have no need of names and epitaphs, / We talk about the dead by our fire-sides” (ll. 176–77). Leonard’s leading question—“Your dalesmen, then, do in each other’s thoughts / Possess a kind of second life?” (ll. 181–82)—echoes the Priest’s explanation that the landscape provides its own chronicle of events: “we all have here / A pair of diaries, one serving, Sir, / For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side” (ll. 160–62). Everything in “The Brothers” comes in pairs: two brothers, two books, two bells, two hours; even “the twin cards tooth’d with glittering wire” which the Priest composing sound  |  89

uses to feed his child’s spindle and which are laid aside—like the brothers themselves—“each in the other lock’d” (ll. 22, 33).44 This insistent doubling makes landscape a figurative record not only of local history but of the interlocking lives of the two tragically separated brothers, Leonard and James. The language of second life hangs on the analogy between natural and human change. The first essay of the Essays upon Epitaphs refers to “the thoughtless, the busy, and the indolent” whose reading habits suit the brevity of the epitaph.45 The Priest, by contrast, reads the record with exasperating thoroughness while Leonard, “the Stranger” unrecognized on his return, finds it confusing and illegible: is this a new grave or an old one? Such moments of unreadability alternate with excessive legibility. Returning from the sea after a twenty-year absence, Leonard loses his way up the familiar valley and, in a moment of overreading, fancies that he sees “Strange alteration wrought on every side / Among the woods and fields, and that the rocks, / And the eternal hills, themselves were chang’d” (ll. 94–96). Elsewhere, however, the Priest points to actual, material changes in the landscape: a lightning-rent pike and only a single spring bubbling where before there had been two, “Companions for each other”—“brother fountains,” as Leonard and James were “brother Shepherds on their native hills” (ll. 140, 141, 72). Through this insistent doubling, Wordsworth signposts landscape as one of the “pair of diaries” that chronicle pastoral life: —On that tall pike, (It is the loneliest place of all these hills) There were two Springs which bubbled side by side, As if they had been made that they might be Companions for each other: ten years back, Close to these brother fountains, the huge crag Was rent with lightning—one is dead and gone, The other, left behind, is flowing still.— (ll. 136–43)46 The rent crag and the lone spring provide figurative analogies for the brothers’ heart-rending separation. Landscape functions in “The Brothers” as if Wordsworth—like the Priest—is already anticipating the out-of-doors illustrative mode of The Excursion. When their grandfather dies, the two brothers are left destitute, the heritage of  Ewbank land consumed by debts and mortgages. Leonard, the older, goes to sea to support them both, leaving James to be cared for by the com90  |  chapter four

munity: “If he had one, the Lad had twenty homes” (l. 383). But a multitude of  homes is no substitute for a brother. James’s underlying disturbance shows itself in the sleepwalking that is blamed for his death. Anxious to play down the possibility of suicide, the Priest conjectures that he tumbled from the crag (“the Pillar”) after falling asleep as he waited for his companions to return: “They found him at the foot of that same Rock / Dead, and with mangled limbs” (ll. 377–78). His traumatic fall puts a decaying human mark on the landscape: “His shepherd’s staff; for midway in the cliff / It had been caught, and there for many years / It hung—and moulder’d there” (ll. 400– 402). The same overdetermined verb, “to hang,” links Leonard’s vision of the calenture at sea to James’s fatal fall. Leonard (hearing the noise of waterfalls, caverns, and trees in the sound of the rigging) “would often hang / Over the vessel’s side, and gaze and gaze” at “images and hues, that wrought / In union with the employment of his heart” (ll. 51–55). The illusory landscape of the calenture was thought to tempt delirious sailors to leap to their deaths: He, thus by feverish passion overcome, Even with the organs of his bodily eye, Below him, in the bosom of the deep, Saw mountains, saw the forms of sheep that graz’d On verdant hills, with dwellings among trees, And Shepherds clad in the same country grey Which he himself had worn. (ll. 56–62)47 Dreaming himself at home, Leonard anticipates James’s sleepwalking plunge. Their parallel forms of  homesickness—James’s unquiet sleep, Leonard’s feverish passion—are alike in confusing internal and visible worlds. In “The Brothers,” the intervention of imagination leads to prolonged uncertainty and unbalance. The effects of separation divide landscape from itself, misremembered or dreamed as unstable, even treacherous. Landscape’s double inscription of trauma—the crag riven by lightning or the spring stopped at its source—is left hanging like the shepherd’s decaying staff. A form of undecidability, this suspension complicates the pairing of diaries whereby the stability of landscape supposedly underwrites the continuity of communal memory. Either landscape is as mutable as the sea, or memory is as deceptive as the sea when it traverses the once-familiar fields where Leonard misses his homeward path (l. 90). This ontological uncertainty overcomes Leonard himself as he lingers in the graveyard: “as he gaz’d, composing sound  |  91

there grew / Such a confusion in his memory, / That he began to doubt” (ll. 83–85). The chiasmus, or crossing, marks the onset of doubt; he (and we) lose our footing in a landscape that proves as treacherous as James’s sleeping place. Landscape and memory are liable to the same slippage. The precariousness (even danger) attributed to figuration emerges in a prominent passage from the Essays upon Epitaphs: “Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.”48 Underlining a violence that has often been remarked in Wordsworth’s fantasy, de Man observes: “The most violent language of all is saved . . . for language itself.”49 Wordsworth’s language is symptomatic in other ways. In “The Brothers,” James is not upheld and left in quiet by the air he breathes, while the power of gravitation works against him when he falls to his death. Like the sea or landscape or memory, all language to the extent that it is inherently figurative (and not just language that “incarnates” thought) acts to derange and dissolve as well as uphold. This is true whether or not it is founded on the visible world or natural analogies, as some Enlightenment theorists had claimed for universal sign language. A derangement effect accompanies both separation and signs, cleaving the bond of brotherhood in the very place where it is supposed to be most firmly grounded. This is not to suggest that Wordsworth had “The Brothers” in mind when he wrote the Essays upon Epitaphs. But the fault lines are already visible in the instability of the trope of natural analogy that permeates “The Brothers.” Wordsworth had personal reasons for fearing separation and death and for associating them with the sea. His brother John, whose arrival was eagerly awaited when he and Coleridge returned from their walking tour at the end of 1799, had made his career as the captain of an East Indiaman; like Leonard, John hoped to support his brother’s less lucrative career as a poet at home at Grasmere.50 Wordsworth called his brother “a Poet in every thing but words.”51 The reticent Leonard is thought to have traits borrowed from John.52 Wordsworth reacted to his brother’s death at sea in February 1805 with intense grief: “there is something cut out of my life which cannot be restored.”53 Recollections of his drowning surface at the start of the second essay in Essay upon Epitaphs, where the confused depths of the sea provide an image for the perturbations that underlie the apparent calm of a country graveyard: “my fancy has penetrated into the depths of the Sea—with accompanying thoughts of Shipwreck, or the destruction of the Mariner’s hopes.”54 Wordsworth recalled that “The Brothers” was “composed in a 92  |  chapter four

grove at the north-eastern end of Grasmere Lake.”55 He also records that during John’s protracted Grasmere visit of 1800, when he was working on “The Brothers,” his brother had been fond of  pacing in a nearby grove, “With that habitual restlessness of foot / Wherewith the sailor measures o’er and o’er / His short domain upon the Vessel’s deck.”56 Composing poet and restless sailor converge at the site of “The Brothers.” The most poignant of all epitaphs in the Essays upon Epitaphs is that of a newborn infant in an overgrown corner of a country churchyard. The grave bears only a name and two dates: In an obscure corner of a Country Church-yard I once espied, halfovergrown with Hemlock and Nettles, a very small Stone laid upon the ground, bearing nothing more than the name of the Deceased with the date of birth and death, importing that it was an Infant which had been born one day and died the following. I know not how far the Reader may be in sympathy with me, but more awful thoughts of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remembrances stealing away or vanishing were imparted to my mind by that Inscription there before my eyes than by any other that it has ever been my lot to meet with upon a Tomb-stone.57 The absence of words becomes the most legible of epitaphs. In lines that Coleridge categorized as “mental bombast” (“thoughts and images too great for the subject”), the Immortality Ode refers to the infant as a deaf-mute who penetrates the depths of the sea: “thou Eye among the blind, / That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep” (ll. 111–12).58 The eye of a deaf-mute infant provides an analogue for the poet’s compensatory overreading of epitaphic signs as he stands, like Leonard, puzzling over a minimally marked grave.

composing sound  |  93

chapter 5

“Distressful Gift” talking to the de ad

I

n February 1805, Wordsworth lost his sailor brother, John, when he was drowned off Portland Bill in the wreck of  the Earl of Abergavenny.1 Wordsworth was grief-stricken: “the set is now broken,” he lamented, calling his brother “a Poet in every thing but words.”2 Writing to a friend, he poured out his overwhelming sense of  loss: For myself I feel that there is something cut out of my life which cannot be restored, I never thought of  him but with hope and delight. . . . I never wrote a line without a thought of its giving him pleasure, my writings printed and manuscript were his delight and one of the chief solaces of his long voyages. But let me stop—I will not be cast down were it only for his sake I will not be dejected. I have much yet to do and pray God to give me strength and power—his part of the agreement between us is brought to an end, mine continues and I hope when I shall be able to think of  him with a calmer mind that the remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the joy which I had in him living.3 A strange hope, but a characteristic one: Wordsworth’s poetry is animated by the afterlife of memory. In John’s words (reported by his brother), this was to have been their agreement: “He encouraged me to persist in the plan of life which I had adopted; I will work for you was his language and you shall attempt to do something for the world.”4 John’s side of the bargain had consisted of the potential profit and risk of commanding an East Indiaman that plied the Bengal-to-China trade route during the Napoleonic Wars.5 Preoccupied for months by family grief, Wordsworth was anxious to clear his brother of any imputation of incompetence—and relieved to find that John’s sizable financial investment of £20,000 had been fully insured.6 Any charge of  negligence on the part of  the East India Company or its employees 94

would have affected the ship’s insurance, and an official inquiry followed the sinking.7 John’s last recorded words were reported to have been “O pilot, you have ruined me.”8 During the months that followed, Wordsworth gradually resumed his side of the bargain, taking up what his sister called “the Task of his life” in order to “writ[e] a poem upon [ John].”9 But he described himself as overwhelmed by “such a torrent” of verse that he could not hold the pen and dared not ask his wife or sister to write for him.10 Later, he wrote a series of intensely personal elegies that he regarded as too melancholy to share with his family or anyone else.11 One of them—never published in his lifetime— provides my title: “Distressful gift! this Book receives / Upon its melancholy leaves, / This poor ill-fated Book” (ll. 1–3).12 So begins a poem that ambiguously apostrophizes book and brother (“thou, my Friend”), as if the two were equally pitiable, equally ill-fated. The gift book that is the poem’s pretext was apparently a commonplace book, belonging to John. It contained a collection of manuscript copies of  Wordsworth’s poems: “framed with dear intent / To travel with him night and day, / And in his private hearing say / Refreshing things” (ll. 31–34).13 The notebook (sealing their bargain) was left behind for Wordsworth as a work in progress, its pages “All fill’d or to be fill’d with store / Of verse for his delight” (ll. 27–28). By the event of his brother’s death it became instead “distressful” (distress-filled)—at once a reminder of poems written or unwritten and an unfinished monument to a life cut short: “a Tale / Of Thee thyself; fond heart and frail!” (ll. 8–9). The book’s fragile materiality becomes a synecdoche for the vulnerability of the human body.14 Milton’s “Lycidas” is the precursor elegy for a poet drowned at sea, albeit a silent poet (“a Poet in every thing but words”). Subtly invoking the conventions and broken rhythms of lyric elegy—“The sadly-tuneful line, / The written words that seem to throng / The dismal page” (ll. 10–12)— Wordsworth’s poem foregrounds the relation between voice and writing, composition and reading: “the sound, the song, / The murmur, all to thee belong; / Too surely they are thine” (ll. 12–14). Sounding, singing, murmuring, his sadly tuneful lines to a dead man stage the most private reading of all: the poet’s rereading of his own poetry. This unheard communication is the type of elegiac address: one-sided, intimate, posthumous. The same unheard address to the dead informs Derrida’s collected memorials to his dead friends in The Work of Mourning (2001). Derrida shows himself to be (as always) a master of the genre—one might almost say, the gesture—of “distressful gift”  |  95

mourning, alert to its self-congratulatory pitfalls and to its opportunities for eloquence. I will be concerned both with the gift of death, as he and Emmanuel Levinas define it, and with what Derrida (in his hommage to his friend Louis Marin) calls “the point of view of death.”15 Derrida’s memorials to Levinas and Marin are representative of the varied tributes to his dead friends included in The Work of Mourning: posthumous replies, unfinished conversations, personal rereadings. These tributes—often continuing dialogues that had been conducted in print and in person over many decades—are characterized by Derrida’s intellectual generosity, by their affective response, and often by subtle yet provocative statements of difference between himself and his dead friends. Derrida’s memorial stance is to put the différance back into reading. He reads not only in the wake of  his friends but beyond them. His elegies are both replies and after-thoughts. They are conversations with the dead. Maurice Blanchot is the missing figure in The Work of Mourning, given his pervasive influence on Derrida’s thinking and writing since the 1960s. Blanchot’s insistence on an impossible outside of writing, or unknown of thought, returns in Derrida’s later writings as the “impossible” itself—a concept to which he appeals when he resists the economization of  his own thought within political or metaphysical systems. I will close by invoking Blanchot’s definition of conversation as interruption, pause, or intermittency. Talking to the dead can be understood as a form of désoeuvrement, in Blanchot’s sense—a restless unworking that refuses totalization and proceeds, not by way of critique, but rather by juxtaposition, divergence, and difference. This is dialectic without negation, yet capable of responding to disaster and of broaching the unknown of one’s own thought through repetition, return, and response. In one of the imaginary dialogues included in The Infinite Conversation (L’Entretien infini; 1969), Blanchot writes, “This redoubling of the same affirmation constitute[s] the strongest of dialogues.”16 I will be reading Wordsworth’s “Distressful gift!” in just such an attempt at dialogue with the questions posed by Derrida, whose own later death made the memorials collected in The Work of Mourning read as at once proleptic and strangely posthumous. Finally, I will return to Blanchot’s aphorism “True thoughts question, and to question is to think by interrupting oneself.”17 Talking to the dead, I propose, prolongs this infinitely interrupted conversation. Derrida’s insight in The Work of Mourning was that his own work might constitute just such a prolongation for those who afterward read in his wake. 96  |  chapter five

Motions of the Life of Love Death—as the death of the other [autrui] . . . is emotion par excellence. — Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time18

Among the most eloquent of Derrida’s tributes to his dead friends is his 1995 elegy for Levinas, “Adieu” (at once “goodbye” and benediction, salutation, or prayer: à-Dieu).19 Derrida opens by expressing his wish to find “unadorned, naked words, words as childlike and disarmed as [his] sorrow.” The wish—the gesture—resonate with the language of  Wordsworth’s elegy. Recognizing that the gesture is inherent in the rhetoric of elegy, Derrida goes on to suggest that more than oratorical convention is at stake. He poses a question about the nature of elegiac address itself: Whom is one addressing at such a moment? And in whose name would one allow oneself to do so? Often those who come forward to speak, to speak publicly, thereby interrupting the animated whispering, the secret or intimate exchange that always links one, deep inside, to a dead friend or master, those who make themselves heard in a cemetery, end up addressing directly, straight on, the one who, as we say, is no longer, is no longer living, no longer there, who will no longer respond.20 The address to another “who will no longer respond” interrupts the secret, intimate exchange that links one to the dead friend. This apostrophe is the supplementary fiction licensed by the public funeral oration in its classical form: the fiction that the elegist is speaking directly to the dead. Derrida’s disarmed and disarming remarks define the elegy as an impossible address to a dead friend who can no longer respond, even if, in reality, his words are addressed to “the dead in me” or to “the others standing around the coffin.”21 The elegiac mode of “Adieu” announces this urge to speak directly to (rather than of) the dead, drawing attention to a form of address which seeks to avoid—yet always risks—the self-interestedness of language that returns self-reflexively to the self or to the community of mourners when the public elegist comes forward to speak: With tears in their voices, they sometimes speak familiarly to the other who keeps silent, calling upon him without detour or mediation, apostrophizing him, even greeting him or confiding in him. This is not necessarily out of respect for convention, not always simply part of  the rhetoric “distressful gift”  |  97

of oration. It is rather so as to traverse speech at the very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent, a reflexive discourse that would end up coming back to the stricken community, to its consolation or its mourning, to what is called, in a confused and terrible expression, “the work of mourning.”22 Derrida’s self-proclaimed “law” of “straightforwardness” (droiture) is “to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other”; to speak for the other before speaking of him (or her).23 As he insists (allowing his unshed tears to be “heard” in the hesitations of his prose), calling upon the other who keeps silent means addressing someone who does not respond. This “no-response” (sans-réponse), Derrida reminds us, is how Levinas himself had defined death.24 Yet to keep on addressing the one who does not respond is also a means to keep alive Autrui (Otherness), perpetuating the secret interior exchange that links the speaker to the dead while keeping him alive within oneself. As Wordsworth affirmed, in the overwrought state that followed his brother’s drowning: “I shall never forget him, never lose sight of him, there is a bond between us yet, the same as if he were living, nay far more sacred.”25 In his elegy, the unheard link of stanza and rhyme keeps this bond in mind and memory: “Making a kind of secret chain, / If so I may, betwixt us twain / In memory of the past” (ll. 19–21). Elegy is a one-sided agreement that chains the living to the dead. Derrida suggests that elegiac address perpetually does and undoes the work of mourning, seeing its incompleteness as the type of (the) “work” itself—always unfinished, never brought to a close; an unworking, or dés­ oeuvrement in Blanchot’s sense of the word. Derrida’s reference to Freud’s “confused and terrible expression, ‘the work of  mourning,’” contests any idea of normative mourning, one that must let the lost object go or else lapse into melancholia.26 Where Freud emphasizes the slow and painful process by which the ego detaches itself from its objects so that life can go on, Derrida insists that we continue to talk to the dead—hearing their voices, reading their books, and seeing their faces. Freud’s account of mourning is complicated, however, by his view that the unconscious knows no tense but the present tense and therefore takes no account of death. Talking to the dead— apostrophizing the other who does not respond—becomes a way to keep them alive in oneself. Reflecting on the ineradicable impulse to memorialize the dead in his Essays upon Epitaphs (composed 1809–10), Wordsworth locates the epitaphic mode in what he calls (quoting John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments) “ ‘the presage or fore-feeling of  immortality, implanted 98  |  chapter five

in all men naturally.’”27 Without some counterbalance to the apprehension of death, “a frost would chill the spirit, so penetrating and powerful, that there could be no motions of the life of love.” Were it not for this natural belief in immortality, he goes on to say, “neither monuments nor epitaphs . . . could have existed in the world.”28 One could read Wordsworth’s belief in the religious promise of an afterlife—Derrida’s “as if ”—not as a denial of death but as a form of realism: when it comes to our love-objects, there is no such thing as memory; our exchanges with them continue as if they were still alive.29 The work of mourning is always unfinished because we can never fully let go of the dead. Writing within a different theological framework, Levinas defines death as “a departure towards the unknown, a departure without return.”30 Derrida quotes his definition of our affective relation to death as “a purely emotional rapport” that orients us toward the unknown: “It is an emotion, a movement, a disquietude within the unknown.” 31 The apprehension of death, for Levinas, is “emotion par excellence. Affection of being affected par excellence.”32 Here emotion—apprehension of death—takes the place of cognition. The elegy is the literary form of affectivity without telos—not so much a clinging to life, as an orientation toward this unknown. Wordsworth’s sense of the disquietude that underlies his communing with the dead, even in the most peaceful of rural settings, is recorded in a well-known passage from Essays upon Epitaphs that silently recalls his brother’s drowning five years previously. A country churchyard may look like a smooth sea on a summer’s day, yet its depths are stirred with anxieties, perturbations, and rancor: “The image of an unruffled Sea has still remained; but my fancy has penetrated into the depths of that Sea—with accompanying thoughts of Shipwreck, of the destruction of the Mariner’s hopes, the bones of drowned Men heaped together, monsters of the deep, and all the hideous and confused sights which Clarence saw in his Dream!”33 Clarence’s dream, in Richard III, envisages these hideous and confused sights from the vantage point of the drowning man: “O Lord! Methought what pain it was to drown, / What dreadful noise of waters in my ears, / What sights of ugly death within my eyes. / Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks” (Richard III, 1.4.21–24). The ocean depths become a place of hideously gnawed and disfigured corpses, scattered treasure, mocking skulls with gems for eyes. However green the graveyard—as Levinas puts it succinctly—“Death is decomposition.”34 Clarence’s murderous dream had formed the discomfiting “motto” or epigraph to the official account of the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny compiled and published soon afterward on the basis of survivor testimonies “distressful gift”  |  99

and reports.35 It took six weeks for John Wordsworth’s body to wash up; by then it must have been almost unrecognizable: “the Body of our dearest John ha[s] been found by dragging and was buried. . . . This is a great comfort to us—his grave is a resting place for our thoughts—the end of all in this world.”36 But “Six weeks beneath the moving Sea / He lay in slumber quietly” (“To the Daisy,” ll. 36–37) before his burial in a mass grave.37 This fiction of the sleeping corpse, in another of the unpublished elegies, makes the period that elapsed between wreck and burial the sleep of a quiet conscience: “All claims of duty satisfied” (“To the Daisy,” l. 40). Two years before, however, in a proleptic sonnet based on the story of Simonides (“I find it written of Simonides”), Wordsworth had emphasized the restlessness of the sailor’s unburied corpse: “travelling in strange countries, once he found / A corpse that lay expos’d upon the ground” (ll. 2–3). Piously, Simonides has the body buried and pays for the performance of “due obsequies.” In recompense, the dead man appears to him and warns him against an impending voyage; Simonides stays on shore, while the ship is wrecked at sea with all on board: “Thus was the tenderest poet that could be . . . Saved out of many by his piety” (ll. 12–14).38 In the Essays upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth again alludes to this story in support of his thesis that Simonides—because, rather than in spite of, his exaggerated respect for bodily remains—was capable of “communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to human nature.” Otherwise, he writes, the corpse of a stranger would have meant no more to him than “the dead body of a seal or porpoise which might have been cast up by the waves.”39 In this case, there would be no need for epitaphs or monuments. Writing of the relation between lyric poetry and elegy’s traditional consolations—its monumentalizing impulse and its promise of immortality— Barbara Johnson notes that despite appearances, “even the most traditional elegy contains the guilty secret that desire is not all for life.”40 The desire for writing and the desire for death are both associated with a particular kind of performance. The ghost of an undead corpse asks Simonides for burial, laying claim to more than mere corporeality. It asks for the gift of death— not forgetfulness but recognition: burial rites, reverence, restitution. What makes mourning terrible as well as confused is the nature of this demand on the survivor, for whom it may be experienced not just as a claim to a proper burial, but as a persecutory tax levied by the dead on the living. Melanie Klein’s autobiographical account of mourning in the wake of  her son’s death brings to light the uneasy triumph of the survivor and its murderous accompaniment—its residue of hatred, denial, and manic control.41 Klein takes a 100  |  chapter five

leaf from Wordsworth’s book when she appeals to the classical gesture of elegy: “The poet tells us that ‘Nature mourns with the mourner.’”42 For her, the surfacing of traditional tropes of mourning signals a freer and more sympathetic relation between inner and outer worlds and the mobilization of creative process.43 Calling on the fiction of sympathetic nature, elegy reimagines the inanimate not as sans-réponse but as responsive—giving it a voice. Just as the trope of the voice allows us to hear the tears in Derrida’s “Adieu” to Levinas, so we hear in Wordsworth’s elegy for his brother “the sound, the song, / The murmur” (ll. 12–13). The mourning of nature with the mourner (pathetic fallacy) is the figure of elegiac emotion, or “emotion par excellence,” as Levinas would say; a call anterior even to dialogue—the figure that gives affect.44

The Survivor’s Gift The question of the gift will never be separated from the gift of mourning. — Jacques Derrida, Given Time45

“It is for the death of the other that I am responsible.”46 So says Levinas. But where Levinas sees responsibility, Derrida sees the potential for betrayal. His reflections on the economy of the gift in Given Time (Donner le temps; 1991) and The Gift of Death (Donner la mort; 1992) combine a rereading of Mauss’s seminal anthropological work on the gift with a critique of  Levinas’s ethics of responsibility.47 Derrida points out in The Gift of Death that the biblical sacrificial scenario (the sacrifice of Isaac) means that the ethics of responsibility “must be sacrificed in the name of duty.”48 In this monstrous story, responding to the call of the Other means, paradoxically, sacrificing him—in this case, one’s own child: “I offer a gift of death, I betray.”49 There is a scandal at the heart of  the Levinasian ethics of  responsibility. In the culture of death, the experience of internalization and secrecy associated with the work of mourning (in psychoanalytic terms, incorporation and repression) involves more than the apportioning of responsibility. Mourning gives rise to the need “to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination for it.”50 This contradicts Freud’s view that there is no representation of death in the unconscious, putting in question Levinas’s unknown destination without telos. In Given Time, Derrida questions whether there is such a thing as a gift at all, arguing (in a familiar move) for its radical and exorbitant impossibility. Mauss, he writes, “speaks of everything but the gift”; his real subject is “distressful gift”  |  101

economy, exchange, contract, sacrifice, and countergift.51 As soon as the gift is recognized as such, it paradoxically ceases to be a gift. Instead, it becomes an exchange, a circulation, or a return. A Derridean gift must exceed the economic category of the gift as Mauss had envisaged it (just as elegy must exceed the category of address to the self or to others and its recuperation within an economy of sameness). Derrida’s language of hyperbole and excess is rooted in suspicion of self-interest. The gift that returns to the giver is like the elegy that refers, self-reflexively, to oneself or the mourners round the coffin. For Derrida the gift must by definition be unrecognized; it must neither circulate nor be exchanged. The gift is not only impossible “but the impossible,” a figure for impossibility itself (just as “the work of mourning” is a figure of the work’s necessary incompleteness).52 Hence Derrida’s insistence on nonreciprocity: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift.”53 By contrast, a poem written to a dead man who has ended his part of the agreement might be seen as eluding this exchange economy.54 What makes Wordsworth’s distress into an impossible gift, in Derrida’s sense, is its one-sidedness: there is no longer anyone alive to receive it.55 Besides reminding us “that Levinas defines the first phenomenon of death as ‘responselessness,’” Derrida invokes “a passage in which he declares that ‘intentionality is not the secret of what is human.’”56 The gift lies beyond intentionality. Like that of “Adieu” (whether salutation, benediction, or supplication), the agency of the gift comes from what it performs rather than from any ontological necessity—from what it does, not from what it is. For Levinas, death is categorical. It exceeds and obliterates not only intentionality but the psychoanalytic category of the unconscious. The gift that Wordsworth gives his dead brother prompts some categorical language on his own part. This is a poem that involves a prohibition: “And so I write what neither Thou / Must look upon, nor others now, / Their tears would flow too fast” (ll. 15–17). Not just will not but must not, as if by proscription as well as by the tragic accident of John’s death. The written words belonging to a dead man—“Too surely they are thine” (l. 14)—are destined not to be read by him or by anyone else. More than a secret solace, this private writing is categorically withheld from those whose “tears would flow too fast.” The unread poem secretes its solitary grief in the interests of other readers, as yet unknown. For Levinas, responsibility to others gives meaning to self-identity; singularity is given only by death, or by the apprehension of death: “We en102  |  chapter five

counter death in the face of the other.”57 But for Derrida the Levinasian concept of singularity is problematic: every other, including God, is every “other”; human alterity is indistinguishable from God’s. Yes, Levinasian ethics are already religious.58 And so it proves for Wordsworth when he makes a request on his own account, at the end of the poem: “but gracious God, / Oh grant that I may never find / Worse matter or a heavier mind . . . / Grant this, and let me be resign’d” (ll. 38–42; my emphases).59 In this combined “question, prayer” (Levinas’s phrase—translated as Derrida’s “questionprayer”), Wordsworth utters a call that Derrida defines as “anterior to all dialogue.”60 It is not only anterior but one-sided. “Prayer,” writes Levinas, “never asks anything for oneself; strictly speaking it makes no demands at all, but is an elevation of the soul.”61 Here he is discussing Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner’s Nefesh ha-hayyim (The Soul of Life), the posthumously published work of a Lithuanian Kabbalistic and Talmudic scholar of the long eighteenth century. Levinas is drawn to Volozhiner’s concept of prayer as a moment of  benediction. According to Levinas, Volozhiner conceives of prayer as essentially disinterested: “True prayer . . . is never for oneself, never ‘for one’s needs.’”62 In answer to the question “is it right for us to ask, in our prayers, for human suffering to be eased?” (historical Jewish suffering, for instance), his response is that prayer may be justified in the case of the unhappy “I”—provided its basic concern is not with one’s own unhappiness but with the suffering of others: “The suffering self prays on behalf of God’s suffering” (because God suffers with man’s affliction).63 But this is not quite how Wordsworth would have viewed it. In Christianity’s bargain, Christ does the suffering for humanity, while God makes the unthinkable sacrifice of his only beloved son. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s “For those who yet remain behind, / Grant this” (ll. 41–42) strikes a less orthodox note than some of his subsequent poetry.64 His prayer on behalf of “those who yet remain behind” includes those whose “tears would flow too fast” (as well as himself). Wordsworth’s distressful gift is not only a supplication but also a benediction for “those who yet remain behind” in a world that brings unlooked-for sorrow. Derrida points out that Christianity’s themes of infinite love, sin, repentance, salvation, and sacrifice revolve around “the fathomless gift of a type of death.”65 God’s exorbitant gift giving and incommensurable sacrifice make for a paradigmatic gift. Only God is allowed to make the radical substitution that apparently exceeds the terms of the gift economy: “the gift of death—and of  the death of  that which is priceless—has been accomplished without any hope of exchange, reward, circulation, or communication.”66 “distressful gift”  |  103

But as Derrida argues, such a gift “re-appropriates the aneconomy of the gift as a gift of life or, what amounts to the same thing, a gift of death.”67 God hands out his own rewards, whether transcendental or metaphysical. But Wordsworth, we know, had worldly, rather than otherworldly, ends in view: “I will work for you was his language and you shall attempt to do something for the world.”68 This ethical work for the world was to have been underwritten by John’s venture capitalism at sea. Both enterprises, for sure, involve willingness to take deferred profits. Derrida’s reading of biblical gift economy paraphrases Matthew 6.19–21, where heaven is called “the place of true riches, a place of treasures, the placement of the greatest thesaurization or laying up of treasures. The correct location of the heart is the place that is best placed.”69 In this celestial tax haven, affective capital can never be devalued; it yields infinite profit, immune to accidents such as shipwreck or uninsured capital, but in the future tense—a good savings plan in the face of worldly insecurity: “The heart will thus be, in the future, wherever you save real treasure.”70 Derrida’s tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of what he calls the “cardiotopology” of the Gospels identifies a hidden accumulation of self-interest. Wordsworth’s entire unfinished oeuvre, of  which “Distressful gift!” is a synecdoche, might be thought of as a form of poetic accumulation laid up for future readers: “All fill’d or to be fill’d with store / Of verse for [our] delight” (ll. 27–28). Like The Prelude itself, his “Distressful gift!” was to remain unpublished for the time being, although not altogether unread. But, as Derrida points out, the writing subject “never gives anything without calculating, consciously or unconsciously, its reappropriation, its exchange, or its circular return.”71 Indeed, the subject becomes visible precisely via the operation of such psychic calculation (including, presumably, its concern for the living). Hence, the truly disinterested Derridean gift is thinkable only on condition of the “death”—not just the anonymity—of the donor/subject. But, as Derrida is careful to say, “only a ‘life’ can give, but a life in which this economy of death presents itself and lets itself be exceeded. Neither death nor immortal life can ever give anything, only a singular surviving can give.”72 Wordsworth’s “Distressful gift!” is the survivor’s gift par excellence, a gift not without (self-)interest, to be sure, but a gift that exceeds the economy of death, just as it exceeds both intentionality and the unconscious. Derrida’s question remains to be answered: what is the relation between gift and grief? And why is the question of the gift inseparable from that of mourning?73 For Derrida at least, the answer turns out to lie in the poem itself, which is at once gift and performance. A poem is already, from its first line, a 104  |  chapter five

figure for the melancholy gift of  itself. He cites Mallarmé’s baleful “Don du poème” (“Gift of the Poem”)—a hyperbolically wretched poetic gift, pale, full of suffering, bearing the traces of its solitary conception, and requiring a readerly (i.e., feminine) supplement.74 Derrida reads Mallarmé’s “Don” as the type of  all poems, and the poem’s gesture as the type of the gift. His definition of the gift is not so much that it is a “free” gift, but rather that it lacks both essence and ontology. It is pure différance, trace, or dissemination—a redefinition designed to supersede both Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of the floating signifier (hau) and Benveniste’s semantically ambiguous “give” and “take” (the dô and dâ of Indo-European languages).75 According to this logic, the Derridean gift becomes—perhaps predictably, certainly hyperbolically—synonymous with the problematic of writing (différance), reading (dissemination), and the give-and-take of mourning (endlessly unfinished work). Grief and désoeuvrement converge on the impossibility (i.e., the unthinkability) of  both the final work and the gift. Exceeding the metaphysics of  presence, signs, essence, or value, Derrida’s theory of the gift takes the poem as both its question and its point de départ. The gift-poem is placed outside all systems of exchange: incalculable, exceptional, neither authentic nor counterfeit. At the end of Given Time, in the footnote that gives him his final lines, Derrida signs off with a poem called (what else?) “Donnant”: “Que désirez-vous donner / C’est le geste qui compte” (What do you desire to give? / It’s the gesture that counts).76 The geste (gesture) is at once sign and action.

The Look of the Book À la place de quelque chose qui est présent ailleurs, voici présent un donnée, ici: image? (In place of something that is present elsewhere, there is here a present, a given: image?) — Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image77

“By Force of  Mourning,” Derrida’s 1993 hommage to his friend and colleague Louis Marin, opens with a reminder that “all work is also the work of  mourning.”78 Here, too, he goes out of his way to dismiss any normative conception of “successful” mourning, if what is meant is banishing the melancholia of uncompleted mourning. He represents himself as drained, forlorn, and distraught, yet preoccupied by the question posed by Marin’s last, posthumously published book, Des pouvoirs de l’image (1993): what is the force of the image? Taking as his starting point Marin’s concern with portraiture— or, rather, with “a particular class representing the dead or death”—Derrida “distressful gift”  |  105

defines what he calls “the point of view of death” as follows: “For it would be from death, from what might be called the point of view of death, or more precisely, of the dead, the dead man or woman, or more precisely still, from the point of  view of the face of the dead in their portraiture, that an image would give seeing, that is, not only would give itself to be seen but would give insofar as it sees, as if it were seeing as much as seen.”79 It is worth lingering on what Derrida means here by “the point of view of death.” The “face of the dead” not so much gives itself to be seen as “sees” the onlooker “as if it were seeing as much as seen.” In doing so, it displaces the point of  view of the living. This constitutive look disturbs both self-presence and temporality (just as, for Levinas, death constitutes an interruption from otherness). Derrida comments at length on a passage from Marin’s introduction to Des pouvoirs de l’image which emphasizes the dramatic effects of representation on the present tense: “Something that was present and is no longer is now represented. In place of  something that is present elsewhere, there is here a present, a given.”80 Wordsworth’s distressful donnée (his “given”) consists in representing his book as having been present in the past or as present elsewhere ( présent ailleurs) and at the same time as a re-presentation; that is, it is both a monument to and a reminder of what is no longer there—his brother’s look, his reading of the book. The look or image of the book that is so insistently “here” (ici), with its “melancholy leaves” and its “written page and white,” stands in for the missing body that is elsewhere (ailleurs). The book is “framed” for, and read by, the look of the absent Friend—“He framed the Book which now I see, / This very Book upon my knee” (ll. 29– 30). The temporality of this seeing and reading has been utterly changed by the interruption of the Friend’s death: “But now—upon the written leaf / I look indeed with pain and grief ” (ll. 36–37). The reading of the book brings pain and grief because its readability re-presents the look of the other, but “from the point of view of death.” Wordsworth’s opening stanza contains another interruption—a striking grammatical incoherence—in the form of an abrupt change of tense: “Distressful gift! this Book receives . . . I wrote” (ll. 1, 4; my emphasis). The point of view of death, which is also the point of view of representation, shifts abruptly from a statement about what is received in the present to an act of writing completed in the past and then, in the space of a few lines, to the future anterior as the writer pre-reads ahead of himself: “and when I reach’d the end / Started to think that thou, my Friend / Upon the words which I had penn’d / Must never, never look” (ll. 4–7). This end-stopped look is the look of the book, the startling point of view of death (“Started 106  |  chapter five

to think,” in the sense of starting with surprise). But there is something extra in representation. Reflecting on the “force” of the image in Marin’s work, Derrida refers to “an acute thought of mourning and of the phantom that returns, of haunting and spectrality”—an effect of the image that “would stem from the fantastic force of the specter.”81 In Wordsworth’s “Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns,” a poem prompted by his visit to Burns’s grave in 1803 (the same year that he wrote the sonnet on Simonides), Wordsworth shrinks with pain beside the grave containing the poet’s bones. His address, however, is not to Burns but to his ghost—or, rather, to what Derrida terms “the fantastic force” of his spectral poetry: And have I, then, thy bones so near? And thou forbidden to appear! As if it were Thyself that’s here I shrink with pain; And both my wishes and my fear Alike are vain. (ll. 7–12)82 Instead of a ghost appearing (“Thyself that’s here”) we “see” and “hear” its verbal trace: the spirited stanza that is at once Burns’s signature tune and his monument. Quotation as a form of hommage brings to life the fierce spirit of the Scots poet.83 As Marin observes, the effect of representation, or making the image present, is to create an image that is more forceful, more intense, and yet in some way more spectral than any original. He calls this spectralizing effect the “primitive” of representation. This doubled image of the body (at once real and fictive, fierce and ghostly) takes a specific form in Derrida’s hommage to his friend Marin, namely, his emphasis on the posthumousness of Marin’s own book as he himself revisits it and gives it another look. His rereading has peculiar and painful immediacy (like Wordsworth’s graveside experience: “As if it were Thyself that’s here”). Derrida writes: “I would especially like to convey to you, trying not to take advantage of the emotion, how difficult and painful it is for me to speak here of this book.” The difficulty and pain of  his rereading have “to do with the strange time of reading that the time of the writing of this book will have, as if in advance, imprinted in us, the friends of Louis.” Derrida imagines Marin as “working on a book he knew he might not, while still living, see.” By its own citation of images and photographs of those who have “passed away,” Marin’s book multiplies what Derrida calls “the survival effect, the effect of  living on.”84 Yet even the “distressful gift”  |  107

proleptic “grammar of the future anterior” is not adequate to convey the tense of this anticipatory yet posthumous reading. Derrida suggests that “the strange temporality” of  Marin’s self-portrayal in advance of  his own death gives peculiar force to the affect of mourning. The uncanny effect is that of “signing the extraordinary utterance . . . that allows one to say ‘I died.’” Derrida sees this “incredible grammar, this impossible time or tense”—about which Marin himself had written—as the impossible time of writing itself: “It is the strange time of his writing, the strange time of reading that looks at and regards us in advance.”85 This is none other than graphological time: “the time or tense, the graphological time, the implicit tempo of all writing.” The tense or tempo of writing is the signature of the writer’s posthumousness. Testifying to his emotion on rereading Marin’s book, Derrida attributes its intensity to something more than “the emotion of mourning that we all know and recognize . . . an emotion that overwhelms us each time we come across the surviving testimonies of the lost friend.”86 Just as Wordsworth is overwhelmed by the surviving testimonies of his lost Friend ( John’s manuscript notebook containing Wordsworth’s own poems), so Derrida’s mourning is overwhelmed by a vertiginous reflexivity that has to do with the time of his reading: “There was another emotion that came to overwhelm this first mourning, this common mourning, coming to make it turn upon itself, I would almost want to say to reflect it to the point of vertigo, another emotion, another quality and intensity of emotion, at once too painful and strangely peaceful, which had to do, I believe, with a certain time of reading.”87 It is this “strange time of reading”—so overwhelming as to be vertiginous—that startles Wordsworth when he comes to the end of his poem, when the pain of loss is caught up in the relays of graphological time-past. Derrida’s hommage continues to address the question of mourning, alluding (as if in a shared psychoanalytic discourse) to “the image commonly used to characterize mourning[, which] is that of an interiorization (an idealizing incorporation, introjection, consumption of the other . . .),” an image that is ultimately Eucharistic in nature. Marin writes about the Eucharist as “the great mourning object.” Without denying psychoanalytic modes of interiorization and subjectivity, Derrida suggests that if this interiorization “must not—and this is the unbearable paradox of fidelity—be possible and completed,” it would be “because of another organization of space and of visibility, of the gazing and the gazed upon.”88 A degree of interiorization is inevitable (“the friend can no longer be but in us”); indeed, it is prepared for, both at the moment of death and beforehand, “in the undeniable antici108  |  chapter five

pation of mourning that constitutes friendship.” The interiorization of the (dead) friend is reducible to visible scenes and projects their traces within us. Whether memories or monuments, “the other of  whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves ‘in us’ only images.”89 In Wordsworth’s poem, the one who has passed away reappears as the visible image of the memorial book: “The written page and white” (l. 24), whose pages he had so often handled, eyed, and turned in anticipation of  his brother’s reading, becomes an image of  his look. It is this image that says so poignantly, in the words of  Derrida’s threnody: “he is no more, he is no longer here, no longer there.” For Derrida, this topology (imago-tropology) of space—neither here nor there—points, not so much to an essential lack, as to a look: “the fact that one is seen there in it. The image sees more than it is seen. The image looks at us.” This is the look of the book—not so much the absence that it reveals (the absence of the reader for whose eyes it had been intended) but the asymmetrical inversion that transforms it into a portrait of the writer-as-reader. The inversion both exceeds and traumatizes the interiority of friendship and of mourning. This asymmetry or dissymmetry of the look is at once anachronous, disquieting, and constitutive of the reading subject as much as any cogito, ego sum: “I know that I am an image for the other and am looked at by the other.” Each (necessarily posthumous) reader is looked at “by the one who, with each page, will have providentially deciphered and prescribed, arranged in advance, a reading of what is happening here, of what makes the present scene possible.”90 Just so does Wordsworth write of this prearranged reading: “He framed the Book which now I see, / This very Book upon my knee” (ll. 29–30). Derrida insists of Louis Marin that “we are all looked at” and that the look is interior to the reader: “He looks at us. In us. He looks in us.” The interiorization of the look (the image or/of seeing) that looks in us, “the experience of this time of reading”—a reading always staged in advance, yet anterior—is caught up in the tempo of  a prior writing. The result is not only the sadness of graphological time but also (in Derrida’s pregnant phrase) “the torsion of the time of reading.”91 This torsion or dis-tortion is at once painful, fascinating, and forever interrupted. Derrida’s tribute to Marin ends with a question that links the gift to death. “Why,” he asks, “does one give and what can one give to a dead friend?” Granted that one’s relation to the other is also one’s relation to oneself—the gaze of  Narcissus regards one from the gaze of the other—what can reading do, other than repeat, in its echoic way, what comes from the resonance of “distressful gift”  |  109

the other? Derrida’s hommage tells the story of an interrupted reading (“I wrote,” “I . . . started”) as well as a pre-staged one. He suggests that Marin knew that the work of death begins prior to death; that is why “this book cannot be closed, why it interrupts itself interminably.” Derrida’s last words narrate a vertiginous speed-reading: “And however prepared I might have been for it, I read it too quickly. In a sort of haste that no mourning will be able to diminish or console. It happened to me too quickly, like Louis’s death. I feel as if I were still on the eve of reading it.”92 In this strange torsion of the time of reading, Derrida’s words resonate with the dislocated future anterior of  Wordsworth’s own vertiginous opening of the book: I wrote, and when I reach’d the end Started to think that thou, my Friend, Upon the words which I had penn’d Must never, never look. (ll. 4–7) The poem’s reading and writing run ahead of themselves, forever unprepared to reach their end, in the sad graphological time that deprives the dead Friend of the reading in which he might see himself interiorized and memorialized by the look of the book. As Wordsworth’s unintended readers, we occupy the same impossible subject-position: the point of  view of death, or the painful pre-text of  his distressful gift to a dead brother.

An Interrupted Line . . . an interrupted line that turns about in a coming and going — Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation93

Blanchot’s essay “Interruption (as on a Reimann Surface),” in The Infinite Conversation (L’Entretien infini; 1969), offers the following definition of conversation: “when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops.”94 Conversation, at once a turning movement and a movement that upholds and sustains (l’entretien), is not dialogue as we usually understand it. Rather, it consists of interruption and interval, pause and return. Elsewhere in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot locates in the word “turn”—“this turn that turns toward that from which it turns away”—what he calls “the original torsion” that speaking tries to disentangle and slacken.95 The same might be said of the relation between prose and 110  |  chapter five

verse: “prose, a continuous line; verse, an interrupted line that turns about in a coming or going.” Poetry, then, is a kind of moving conversation, interrupted and undone by the to-and-fro movement that distinguishes it from prose: “The first turn, the original structure of turning (which later slackens in a back and forth linear movement) is poetry.” This poetic form of conversation has its own rhythm, its own detours and deflection: “In this turn that is rhythm, speech is turned toward that which turns aside and itself turns aside.”96 Poetry’s fort/da movement is a kind of conversation that is constantly turned toward another: an averted apostrophe. The Infinite Conversation pays tribute to Blanchot’s intellectual friendship with Levinas, including his definition of Autrui as the mark of a caesura or interruption (“it is this fissure—this relation with the other—that we ventured to characterize as an interruption of  being”).97 Prefaced by the staging of an imaginary conversation and paying tribute to his long dialogue with Levinas, the “infinite conversation” of  Blanchot’s title refers to “the turn and turn about of plural speech.” His metaphor for this alternating plurality is a mathematician’s conceptual tool, the Reimann surface: a virtual talking book. Blanchot’s footnote to “Interruption (as on a Riemann Surface)” explains his title by means of an anecdote told about Paul Valéry: Mathematicians use a tool called a Riemann surface: it is an ideal notepad made up of as many pages as necessary, fastened together according to certain rules, and whose total thickness amounts to nearly nothing. Upon this leaved surface numbers are inscribed, some of which occupy the same place upon different sheets. In the course of a conversation, Valéry said . . . , “Don’t you find that conversations occur on a Reimann surface? I make a remark to you, it is inscribed upon the first sheet; but at the same time I prepare on the second sheet what I will say to you next, and even on a third sheet what will come after. From your side you respond upon the first sheet, while at the same time putting in reserve on other sheets what you intend to say to me later.”98 Like Wordsworth, Blanchot uses the metaphor of a book to define both the topographical and temporal turning of the page, in space and time. Turning becomes a metaphor for the temporality of  writing, or what Blanchot’s note calls “the principle of deferred speech.”99 Wordsworth, too, computes the material disaster of  John’s voyage (with its loss of life and money) in metrical “numbers” inscribed on “The written page and white.” The turn and turn about of Wordsworth’s verse form the “secret chain” that binds him to his drowned brother. Verse is the interrupted conversation “distressful gift”  |  111

that links living and dead. The pause permits not just exchange but an opening for disaster. Some pauses stop the conversation altogether: “and when I reach’d the end / Started . . .” If poetry’s turns and returns, its strange fits and starts of passion, are its mode of conversation—indeed, its constitutive mode of thought—each pause or intermittence resembles a small apprehension of death. Both poet and reader “start” at the end. Blanchot’s essay intimates the gravity of the pause, the irreducible distance that already separates two interlocutors. One mode of communicative relation implies an interrelational space, or dialectical relation, whereby the other is regarded as a second self to be brought into harmony and unity with the first. But a second, nondialectical modality relates, altogether more disturbingly, to the ineluctable singularity and separateness of the self: “what is now in play, and demands relation, is everything that separates me from the other.” Here there can be no direct communication, only a hiatus, or unknown mode of being, to which “the interruption in language itself responds, the interruption that introduces waiting.”100 This is the separation that for Blanchot (as for Levinas) constitutes “an interruption of being.” Waiting out the turns and pauses of Wordsworth’s elegy, the reader “hears” in its syncopated rhythms the writing of intermittence-asseparation. Blanchot’s name for the pause where intermittence speaks is “the speech of writing”—something previously unthought or unwritten, “the interruption by which the unknown announces itself.”101 The unknown announces, not just suspension, but (in his phrase) an interruption that chokes or “asphyxiate[s] speech,” like starting or drowning. Pain or affliction (malheur)—distress—may make it impossible to speak, unless to bring that impossibility to expression: “But now—upon the written leaf / I look indeed with pain and grief, / I do” (ll. 36–38). In the gap, or caesura, that Blanchot calls “the ultimate, the hyperbolical” interruption, the recognition of death makes itself felt as sheer, meaningless (but not affectless) reduplication: Wordsworth’s sad, emphatic “I do.” Blanchot’s speculative mode of thought makes self-interruption the prelude to any understanding. Hence, he questions whether speech (i.e., writing) “does not always mean attempting to involve the outside of any language in language itself.” What is excluded from speech is silence. In the pause of  waiting, writes Blanchot, “it is not simply the delicate rupture preparing the poetic act that declares itself, but also, and at the same time, other forms of arrest.”102 Death, for instance. This is a Wordsworthian formulation. Pausing in his “mimick hootings to the silent owls” (Prel. 5.398), the Winander Boy experiences in their nonre112  |  chapter five

sponse the intimation of a longer silence or “impossible interruption” that foretells his death. I want to end by noting that the turns and returns of  Wordsworth’s verse in “Distressful gift!” create a reliably returning seven-line stanza (aabcccb). But he ends with an eight-line stanza and an extra rhyme: “find / mind / behind / resign’d” (aabccccb instead of aabcccb). This extralineal emphasis reinforces Wordsworth’s question-prayer, “Oh grant”: “Grant this, and let me be resign’d / Beneath thy chast’ning rod” (ll. 42–43). The distressful gift morphs into resignation and implied obedience, if not chastening by divine punishment. God rhymes unambiguously with “rod.” But this shift of  address (from book to God) involves another kind of resigning. In “The Absence of the Book,” Blanchot writes that whereas the book can be signed, by contrast “the work . . . requires resignation, requires that whosoever claims to write it renounce himself as a self and cease designating himself.”103 While the book is bound up with completion, the work designates incompletion, désoeuvrement, and disaster.104 For Blanchot, it is the breaking of the tablets (“the set is now broken”)—an originary fracture—that renders the writing of the Torah legible. The first law emanating from the disaster, “thou shalt reject presence in the form of  resemblance, sign, and mark,” thereafter interdicts the sign as a mode of presence. There is no way back, given this radical break, except for the game of indeterminate and inessential chance that Blanchot calls writing, “the game in which everything is each time risked and everything lost.”105 This, you might say, was Wordsworth’s side of his bargain with John—the game of absolute risk and loss that underwrites his poetical work for the world, making it not an exchange but a distressful gift.

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chapter 6

The Breath of Life wordsworth and the gravit y of thought

O

Life is living on, life is survival. . . . To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death. —Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally 1

n Thursday, 29 April 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal records a beautiful morning. She and William went to “Johns grove” (their sailor brother’s favorite spot) and lay and listened to the sound of their own breathing and “the peaceful sounds of the earth”: William lay, & I lay in the trench under the fence—he with his eyes shut & listening to the waterfall & the Birds. There was no one waterfall above another—it was a sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air. William heard me breathing & rustling now & then but we both lay still, & unseen by one another—he thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth & just to know that ones dear friends were near.2

The Grasmere spring of 1802 was a period of ecstatic intensity: reeling and dancing with the daffodils, temporary partings and emotional reunions, visits from Coleridge, and almost constant lyric composition (“I found William writing a poem descriptive of the sights & sounds we saw and heard”).3 There was also a good deal of lying about the place (“William lay, & I lay”): on beds “in vacant or in pensive mood,” beside the fire, or, as here, side by side in a trench—a convenient, companionable, but not final resting place. What William and Dorothy hear is the wordless vocalization of nature (“the voice of the air”) —and their own breath coming and going: “William heard me breathing & rustling.” Communication like this is pure aeration, the most basic interchange between self and self, self and other, inner and outer. 114

Breathing, the lowest common denominator of animal life, transforms death into the sweetness of rest: “it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave.” Wordsworth and late Derrida are both eloquent on the subject of survival; and each combines a propensity to mourn with special acuity about the genres of death.4 For Derrida, in his last interview, writing is the trace that survives death. In a bibliographic trope, he invokes Benjamin’s notion of überleben, “surviving death, like a book that survives the death of its author, or a child the death of his or her parents” (as the orphaned Wordsworth did), contrasting it with fortleben, “living on, continuing to live.”5 What survives is originary, “not derived from either living or dying”—any more than mourning waits for death, since mourning is part of living: “We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve.”6 Although this sounds melancholy, Derrida insists, to the contrary, that deconstruction is “always on the side of the yes” and that everything he says “about survival as a complication of the opposition life/death proceeds in [him] from an unconditional affirmation of  life.”7 Wordsworth’s conditional biopoetics complicates the opposition (life/death) with a more equivocal “maybe yes, maybe no.” The breath of a dying hart, in “Hartleap Well,” for instance, causes the waters of a spring to tremble and groan; the last gasp of a living creature is heard as nature’s sympathetic exhalation, but the place is forever blighted by the hunter’s vainglorious pursuit of his quarry. Breath and death together haunt the unknown modes of being sensed in The Prelude, where nature’s low breathings are at once animist and monitory. Breath is life, but it simultaneously signifies death, or what lives on after death, making super-nature a form of unquiet haunting. Respiration itself tends inevitably toward death: as Freud reminds us, death—the condition of inanimateness—is the inert state to which all organic life aspires. The Prelude announces its poetic “Breathings for incommunicable powers” as “far hidden from the reach of words” (Prel. 3.188, 185). By contrast, the lyric—less heroic, more impulsive—is breathily communicative: sighing, singing, vocal. But it too is philosophic. The child’s tenacious feel for life in “We Are Seven” rhymes breath and death in the midst of childhood’s (for the adult, unbearable) lightness of being: “A simple child . . . / That lightly draws its breath, / And feels its life in every limb, / What should it know of death?” (ll. 1–4). Derrida translates this graveyard lesson into Socratic teaching: “to philosophize is to learn to die. I believe in this truth without being able to resign myself to it.”8 The little girl balks at a truth that her interlocutor believes but cannot accept—like Derrida, he is unresigned. When Wordsworth rhymes “breath” with “death,” he underlines this unacceptable the breath of life  |  115

counterintuition. The philosopher-poet’s question (what should a child know of death?) is also the poem’s question: what should lyric poetry know of death, when the lyric has so much to do with life—with living on? I want to explore the interpenetration of life, breath, and death in the Wordsworthian lyric, first by way of D. W. Winnicott’s speculation about the child’s capacity to be alone in the company of someone else; then in philosophic terms suggested by Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Weight of a Thought” (“Le poids d’une pensée”) in The Gravity of Thought (1992); and finally via his meditation on sleep in The Fall of Sleep (Tombe de sommeil; 2007). I will be arguing that while breath may be a sign of life, it also implies the epitaphic afterlife of the Wordsworthian lyric.

“I Am Alone” The basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox: it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present. — D. W. Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone” 9

The Wordsworthian lyric oscillates between two poles: timely utterance and pensive thought, the systole and diastole of the lyric impulse, elsewhere defined by Wordsworth as the tension between the overflow of spontaneous emotion and recollection in tranquility. A short lyric written a week or so before William and Dorothy lay in their trench—“These chairs they have no words to utter”—encapsulates the mingled lightness and gravity of Wordsworth’s lyric composition during the spring of 1802. Lying on a bed alone is more than a companionable solitude; lyric utterance comments on the silence and resistance, the sheer materiality, of un-uttering everyday things that speak only of muteness and death: These chairs they have no words to utter, No fire is in the grate to stir or flutter, The ceiling and floor are mute as a stone, My chamber is hush’d and still,    And I am alone,    Happy and alone. Oh! who would be afraid of life?   The passion the sorrow and the strife,    When he may lie    Shelter’d so easily? 116  |  chapter six

May lie in peace on his bed, Happy as they who are dead.10 Silent chairs, fireless grate, mute ceiling and floor—this could be the chamber where a coffined corpse is laid out: hushed and still as a sepulcher. The chairs have no words because they are insensate; they cannot be stirred into movement or speech. If life were stilled thus, who would be afraid of its tempestuous uncertainties? The redundant trope of muteness (“mute as a stone”) makes it possible to hear the audible sounds of  life—the poet’s own utterance, for instance—in new ways. “Who would be afraid of life?” is a variant on the other great question that troubles the living: “who would be afraid of death?” This is the sense that surfaces in the final line: “Happy as they who are dead.” Rhyming with bed, the last word, “dead,” wishfully suspends passion, sorrow, and strife (rhymed with “life”)—making it a temporary state, like falling asleep; yet the finality of death haunts this state of merely suspended animation. Why should Wordsworth, lying at peace on his bed, imagine himself inhabiting a scene of death, as if he were a corpse laid out for burial? The silence of mute insensate things, as Dorothy’s journal entry makes clear, is not silent at all but vocal. Nor does the involuntary speechlessness of chairs equate to the wordless breathings of nature. Lacking utterance, chairs lack feeling, except for the feeling of their impenetrability that such things arouse in the living. Insensibility inhabits life as its other. Yet the poet insists on being “happy and alone”—happy to be alone; happy to be. What then is the secret of such happy being? In an essay called “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958), W. D. Winnicott explores the significance of the patient’s silence—for instance, in a silent analytic phase or session— and considers it in the light of an achievement: “Perhaps it is here that the patient has been able to be alone for the first time.”11 Winnicott’s subject is not “the fear of being alone or the wish to be alone” but rather “the ability to be alone”—the positive aspect of the capacity to be alone, as opposed to persecutory withdrawal or fearfulness about being impinged on by others. Locating such experience in the two-body relationships of infancy (infant and mother), Winnicott carefully distinguishes it from actually being alone. What he means is a highly sophisticated phenomenon of aloneness based on experiences in very early life. As with all Winnicott’s most suggestive and original formulations, his meaning depends on a paradox. The capacity to be alone depends on there having been someone there—typically, a supportive maternal presence: “the basis of the capacity to be alone is a the breath of life  |  117

paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present,” either the mother or her substitute, whether human, natural, or nonhuman.12 This could as well be a sister, a setting, or a sheltering container (a cot, a pram, a bed, a ditch—or a coffin). To sustain aloneness, there needs to be, in Kleinian terms, a good internal object or, in Winnicott’s terms, a benign holding environment. The adult’s sophisticated experience of aloneness is predicated on its infantile precursor, a very early form of ego-relatedness supported by a good-enough, nondamaging “maternal environment.” Winnicott uses a characteristic trope to illustrate what he means: he makes the prelinguistic infant speak. His mode of inquiry is to parse an imaginary three-word utterance: “I am alone.” “First,” he writes, “there is the word ‘I,’ implying much emotional growth.” There can be no “I” without integration: a boundary must have been instituted between internal and external world in order for the subject to come into being. But “at this point no reference is being made to living.” The next step is “I am”: “By these words the individual not only has shape but also life.” The infant is alive, has creative being (the finite “I AM,” in Winnicott’s Coleridgean terminology). Raw, vulnerable individuality is achievable only because of a protective environment attuned to the infant’s needs, “a mother preoccupied with her infant and oriented to the infant’s ego requirements through her identification with her own infant.” The infant, however, has no awareness of the mother as distinct from itself at this stage. Finally comes the three-word sentence “I am alone”—a development from “I am” that depends on the infant’s awareness of a reliable and sustaining mother. It is this reliability that “makes it possible for the infant to be alone and to enjoy being alone, for a limited period.”13 Note the importance of time; the infant is as yet unable to sustain aloneness indefinitely without traumatic consequences. The achievement of the capacity to be alone (which paradoxically depends on the presence of another) makes it possible for the infant to discover an inner life—what Winnicott calls his or her “own personal life.” Without this experience, there would only be a false life or a self built entirely on reacting vigilantly to external stimuli, objects, or people: “When alone in the sense that I am using the term, and only when alone, the infant is able to do the equivalent of what in an adult would be called relaxing.”14 Adult relaxation (“William lay, & I lay”) implies a state of subjective unintegration, without orientation to others, free of external impingement or directed interest and movement. Only in this state can a sensation or impulse arrive and then be felt to be “truly a personal experience.” Lyric utterance, one might say, is just such a privileged form of experience for Wordsworth; it arises in a 118  |  chapter six

setting where another is available, whether internally or externally, yet is not making demands or being required to respond. For Winnicott, this discovery or rediscovery of “the personal impulse” is never wasted, because (as he emphasizes) “the state of being alone is something which (though paradoxically) always implies that someone else is there.”15 Although by definition objectless, it is a form of relation: it has a sustaining prop, like the orphaned child of The Prelude: “The props of my affections were remov’d, / And yet the building stood” (Prel. 2.294–95). The episode recorded in Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal can be re-parsed in light of Winnicott’s essay as just such an experience of aloneness in the presence of another—a sibling, for instance, or even nature, or else “someone who is equated ultimately and unconsciously with the mother.”16 So far, so Wordsworthian. But Winnicott ends by venturing a much stranger speculation, one that bears on aesthetics as well as aloneness. Instead of the sexual orgasm of instinctual experience, there may also be what he calls an “ego orgasm,” or “ecstasy”—whether while enjoying a concert or theatrical performance or watching the happy playing of children or when a heart dances in memory with the daffodils: “when on my couch I lie, / In vacant or in pensive mood” (“I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” ll. 13–14). Wordsworth’s capacity for ecstasy is what distinguishes him from the silent and unfeeling chairs. Lying down takes on new meaning: lying as an infant in a crib or pram, as an adult on a bed or in a ditch, or even (in one’s imagination) as a sentient corpse in the sheltering grave makes an ecstatic form of experience available. “I am alone”—Winnicott’s paradoxical articulation of a state that predates language, or even a fully distinct sense of self—is the burden of Wordsworth’s lyric utterance, which remains, however, fundamentally aesthetic in its mode. The aesthetics of ecstatic experience provide one pole of lyric’s oscillation. The other pole consists of the breathings for immortality that constitute lyric thought.

The Weight of Thought The weight of a thought—its local, pointed, stretched, multiple, disappropriated open weight—is also what is called, in another vocabulary, finitude. — Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought 17

“Half an hour afterwards” (his annotated title to the second installment) Wordsworth composed a companion piece to “These chairs they have no words to utter”: the breath of life  |  119

I have thoughts that are fed by the sun;   The things which I see   Are welcome to me,   Welcome every one:   I do not wish to lie    Dead, dead, Dead, without any company;   Here alone on my bed, With thoughts that are fed by the sun And hopes that are welcome every one,   Happy am I. O life there is about thee A deep delicious peace; I would not be without thee,   Stay, oh stay! Yet be thou ever as now, Sweetness and breath with the quiet of death,   Peace, peace, peace.18 How can one begin to parse this pellucid, self-rocking utterance of a self that thinks in lyric form? Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” offers an entry point. The gravity of death surfaces as an echo of Arcite’s poignant lament: What is this world? What asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye. (“The Knight’s Tale,” ll. 2777–79)19 Quietist and lover, Arcite lies dying after losing the battle for Emily to his friend-turned-foe, Palamon. By implication, Wordsworth’s is also the tenderer and more regretful part. Solar nourishment counters the unwished-for loneliness of the grave: “I have thoughts that are fed by the sun.” Yet these thoughts tend deathward even as they affirm organic life. The lyric’s sighing, “Stay, oh stay!” vocalizes the sense that life is always leaving, breath by breath, line by line, beat by beat (“Dead, dead, / Dead”)—ebbing away ineluctably, until the internal rhyme of the penultimate line arrives at its destination: “Sweetness and breath with the quiet of death.” The thrice-repeated exhalation of the final line—“Peace, peace, peace”—asks: is this sleep or death? The poet says, “Happy am I” (a phrase that deserves Winnicottian parsing). But the price for being able to string together “I” and “am” and “happy” is 120  |  chapter six

an acknowledgment of one’s potential for unhappiness or unbeing. In this sense, death subtends life: “I am dead” becomes the chair’s unutterable sentence on the still living. Being as such depends for Wordsworth on what The Prelude calls “the gravitation and the filial bond / Of nature” that connect the infant to the world (Prel. 2.263–64)—another name for Winnicott’s maternal holding environment. In The Gravity of Thought, Jean-Luc Nancy equates gravity with the weight carried by all thinkers: “thinking is the condition of everyone, the human condition; . . . we all carry this weight. Or, rather, we do not carry it: we are this weight.” He defines the weight of existence as “being outside of oneself ”—“having one’s landing point or place of presence, one’s earth, ground, or void, one’s belonging or abyss, outside of oneself. Weight means to fall outside of oneself. ”20 The sustaining environment that subtends thought in the Wordsworthian lyric is both earth, ground, and grave, at once ditch and abyss: a place that sustains thought while precipitating its opposite, unthinkable unthought, or the coterminous end of sentience and utterance. For Nancy, “the existence of the world is grave, but this gravity has the lightness of that which exists without any other justification than existing. . . . ‘Self ’ is a place of gravity without bottom or center. ”21 For Nancy there is a kind of gravity in such anti-Newtonian lightness of being (“Weight means to fall outside of oneself ”). The adjective “grave,” derived from the Latin gravis, means “serious,” “weighty,” or “heavy”—hence “gravitation,” a theory of mass and force, relationship and determinacy. But the common English noun “grave” derives from the Old English graef, “ditch.” It has its roots in verbs for digging and carving—hence the related sense of engraving or incising: “the point of a pen or of a stylus, any writing insofar as it traces out the interior and exterior edges of language.”22 Genres of death—graveyard epitaphs, for instance—are serious by virtue of this confluence of thought and earth, death and ditch, gravity and incised inscription. Wordsworth’s lyric utterance is overtly antideath—“O life there is about thee / A deep delicious peace”— yet his invocation to the breath of life is freighted with thoughts of death. Nancy’s “The Weight of a Thought” (1991), the final essay in The Gravity of Thought, asks how thought weighs on the thinker, exploring both the coincidence of weighing and thinking and the dissonance of material and immaterial that leaves its etymological trace in language: pensare means at once “to weigh” and “to think.” This accidental coincidence between disparate meanings, like that of “grave” and “grave/graef, ” is nonetheless thought provoking. “Bodies are heavy,” writes Nancy. One thinks of the difference the breath of life  |  121

between the falling body, the sleeping body, the dead body, and the inert mass of—say—a silent chair: “Thought weighs exactly the weight of meaning.” In other words, “The weight of a thought . . . is what is also called, in another vocabulary, finitude.”23 Nancy’s nontranscendental sense of finitude is a mode of both survival and ending. Like death, it is singular rather than totalizing—uncompleted, contingent, dispersed, allowing existence and thing to remain at issue, outside definitive meaning and thought. In a Wordsworthian moment of his own, Nancy declares: “The existence of the slightest pebble already overflows; however light it may be, it already weighs this excessive weight.”24 It has the meaning of affective thought. For Wordsworth, even the most insignificant natural phenomenon prompts thoughts beyond tears, at any rate to a consciousness freighted with the sense of mortality: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (“Immortality Ode,” ll. 205–6).25 Nancy, however, is also concerned with the sheer impenetrability of things, with the way meaning comes into being “like a concretion, a thickening, an ossification, an induration of meaning itself,” or else as “a sudden, destabilizing weight of thought.” Who, asks Nancy, “would not want a thought that blocks all passage through it, that does not let itself be breached?” “Who would not want an impenetrable meaning, a meaning that has consistency and resistance?”26 The consistency of things sustains a world of unstable meaning. Wordsworth’s un-uttering chairs pre­ sent themselves with just such impenetrability—neither figurative nor meta­ phorical but hardened and resistant to (being) thought. Nancy describes the act of thinking thus: “The act of thinking is an actual weighing; it is the very weighing of the world, of things, of the real as meaning.”27 The lightness and breath of Wordsworth’s lyric utterance weighs the real as the destabilizing meaning of things. Even at moments of most apparent vacancy, poet and philosopher coincide: “Thought weighs exactly the weight of meaning.”28 If the language of the epitaph—as the Essays upon Epitaphs implicitly argue—is the type of lyric utterance, then ostensibly lifeaffirming lyrics like “These chairs they have no words to utter” and “I have thoughts that are fed by the sun” belong to Wordsworth’s epitaphic genre of death. No less than Nancy’s conceptless, finite philosophy, they think about what it means to live, to think, and to die. Wordsworth’s un-uttering chairs become placeholders for things that resist being thought yet, through their resistance, provoke it. Their induration and silence keep the breathing, sighing, pondering poet just this side of sleep. 122  |  chapter six

“This I That Sleeps” I sleep and this I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say that it is dead. — Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep 29

Wordsworth’s “Miscellaneous Sonnets” of 1802 include a sequence of three restless sonnets “To Sleep”—or, rather, to torturing insomnia. Lying sleepless night after night, tormented by his inability to fall asleep, Wordsworth invokes sleep as a perverse tyrant or an elusive lover who refuses to beguile, a mother who will not come when wanted or a child who will not come when called. In her account of the “rhetoric of wakefulness” in Wordsworth’s poetry, Sara Guyer links ideas of wakefulness and vigilance (in French, veiller) to ideas about attention to disaster—to living on, endlessly alert, like Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster (L’Écriture du désastre; 1980), in a world deprived of immanent or transcendental meaning.30 Reading Wordsworth’s trio of sonnets in terms of the figural relation between insomnia and poetry—“the wakeful subject and the lyric subject, vigilance and figurative language”—Guyer argues that figuration installs watchfulness in the very act of soliciting sleep.31 One might say this of the sonnet form itself, with its demand for syntactical and formal hyperalertness. The lyric poet perversely wills sleeplessness as a kind of antipoetics, witnessing to an excess of wakefulness that is at odds both with the sleep of the grave and with the companionable breathings of the ditch. For Guyer, the vigilance of these poems brings into view the ethics—the (im)possibility—of the Romantic lyric in the wake of Auschwitz. Her probing reading focuses on the figure of apostrophe. Summoning sleep as unconsciousness, she argues, “raises anew the question of the meaning of apostrophe.”32 Guyer’s figural reading is largely concerned with negativity. Sleepinducing figures of apostrophe instead produce unbearable wakefulness; thinking about sleep abolishes it, by insisting on apostrophic address. A timely utterance gives no relief. The wakefulness of the poet elicits Guyer’s turn to philosophy, in this case Levinas’s reflections on ethics and existence.33 Pursuing a different line of thought, I want to invoke Nancy’s The Fall of Sleep, whose ambiguous French title, Tombe de sommeil (tomb of sleep), brings with it not only the implication of falling asleep but the graveyard motif that—so I have been arguing—subtends even the most seemingly off-duty Wordsworthian lyric. Nancy’s philosophic exploration of sleeping subjectivity focuses, not on figures or mode of address, but on the phenomenology the breath of life  |  123

of sleep. He starts from the falling that is part of “the fall of sleep,” with all its implications of inertia and loss of alertness, its physical weight and lack of utterance; but like Wordsworth, he ends in the graveyard. Nancy’s claim that “this I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say that it is dead” raises an interesting Winnicottian question.34 What would it mean to say, if one could: “I am asleep”? Or even, impossibly, “I am dead”? The answer depends on the enunciating “I” as much as the nature of sleep. Nancy privileges a kind of vacancy at the heart of sleep, even when falling asleep satisfied in the arms of another. For him there is a special kind of impersonality in sleep, and that is why we seek it. Sleep is nonrelational. Yet Winnicott may be right when he says that falling asleep depends on a prior experience of being held, or upheld, by the gravitation that The Prelude identifies with the maternal environment and that Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs identifies with language itself—if not with the very air we breathe: “Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit.”35 In Wordsworth’s sonnets to sleep, language proves just such a treacherous counterspirit, refusing to feed or quiet. Sleep becomes an insect vexing and mocking peace with its futile efforts to settle or gain purchase on a moving stream: “ A Fly, that up and down himself doth shove / Upon a fretful rivulet” (“To Sleep,” Miscellaneous Sonnets 5, ll. 6–7).36 This strenuous image for waking consciousness, striving fretfully on the surface of things, contrasts in the second of the three sonnets with Wordsworth’s use of sleep-inducing parataxis: A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, One after one; the sound of rain, and bees Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky; I’ve thought of all by turns; and still I lie Sleepless . . . (“To Sleep,” Miscellaneous Sonnets 6, ll. 1–6)37 One might almost say that sleep is defeated by parataxis itself, as one sheep after another drifts by, bees murmur, seas give way to smooth fields. The soothing list of images and sounds (“I’ve thought of all by turns”) has no terminus: “still I lie / Sleepless.” However stealthy the turn of the line, it goes nowhere yet is never arrested. In the third sonnet Wordsworth writes, “Shall I alone . . . Call thee worst Tyrant . . .?” (“To Sleep,” Miscellaneous Sonnets 7, ll. 9–11).38 The emphatic semicolon sets off the sheer aloneness of not being able to sleep, in this case 124  |  chapter six

for lack of its “Dear bosom Child”—reversing the mother/infant relation. The sonnet seems to ask: “Shall I [be forever] alone?” Wakefulness becomes a form of maternal deprivation. Not being able to stop wanting sleep—“Still last to come where thou are wanted most!” (l. 14)—transforms wakefulness into unappeased need, collapsing the neediness of the child and that of the childless mother. In the lulling imagery of attempted sleep induction, by contrast, we find not want or lack but the sheer passage of identical sheep, sounds emptied of meaning, pure vacancy—“white sheets of water, and pure sky”: the impossible evacuation of identity, perception, and thought, along with linguistic, auditory, and visual consciousness. It is not so much that lack hollows being into desire ( pace Lacan) as that emptiness represents a desire endlessly unfulfilled, the desire, as it were, to be without desire, or even language, given the premise that utterance is incompatible with sleep. Instead, the strict metrical form of the sonnet enforces alertness, the poetics of insomnia masquerading as lyric. The sonnets “To Sleep” embody a contradiction in terms. And what about philosophy? Can the truth-seeking philosopher fall asleep or only write about it? As Nancy puts it, capturing the simple inertia of infant or adult, “We feel the suspense of feeling. We feel ourselves falling, we feel the fall.”39 The feel of falling is the suspension of feeling: a paradoxical feeling of suspense. To fall asleep is to “slip entire into the innermost and outermost part of myself, erasing the division between these two putative regions.”40 The price of becoming undivided is this loss of sentience and subjectivity: “I sleep and this I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say that it is dead.” The meaning of sleep shows itself in making sense appear and disappear, like the subject: “Sense, here, neither fulfills nor enlightens. It overflows and obscures signification, it makes sense only of sensing oneself no longer appearing.”41 This nonappearance of the self is what Wordsworth’s sleep-inducing list of passing or vacant things tries to evoke—an empty succession of unadulterated thingness that Nancy names as Kantian thingness without subjectivity: “The thing, isolated from all manifestation, from all phenomenality, the sleeping thing at rest. . . . The thing not measured, not measurable, the thing concentrated in its indeterminate and non-appearing thingness.” And again, “The presence of the sleeper is the presence of an absence, the thing in itself is a thing of no-thing.”42 The sleeper yearns for, yet fears, this absence. The absence of the human sleeper is at the same time not nothing, since it is imbued with the rhythm of respiration. In that sense, sleep is always inhabited by the lullaby that, in order to induce sleep, mimics it: “What leads the breath of life  |  125

to sleep has the shape of rhythm, of regularity and repetition. It is a matter of nothing but mimicry, since sleep itself is rhythm, regularity, and repetition.”43 Nancy’s lullaby imitates both life (breath) and the metrical to-andfro of the lyric: “the initial beat between something and nothing, between the world and the void, which also means between the world and itself. ” The suspension of sense and the disappearance of the subject share the rhythms of metrical language: “the spacing and balancing of nihil among things, beings, substances or subjects, positions, places, times.”44 Nancy’s evocative “swaying of the world as lullaby” is already permeated by difference and spacing, oscillating between thing and no-thing. In this sense, the rhythms of language continue to punctuate sleep, along with the coming and going of consciousness and breath. In a phrase that would be Wordsworthian were it not ascribed to the sleeplessness of modernity, Nancy declares that the soul never sleeps: the modern form of insomnia to which he alludes, however, is that of the restless, hyperalert, unsleeping city, without rhythm, lullaby, or darkness. Nancy’s insomniac city inscribes a crucial difference between the Romantic sleeper and the urban sleepwalker who inhabits a world without refrains or stillness, where nothing can ever be forgotten or surrendered to quiet, and the only way to get to sleep is to be knocked out for the duration. Nancy’s meditation on sleep inadvertently deconstructs its own premise that the “I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say that it is dead.” Just as sleeping consciousness is permeated by language, so the dead survive in “the grave elevation of earth or stone”—the epitaphic performance of speech after death. Sleep is everywhere inscribed in the ubiquitous and repetitious memorial landscape of the cemetery: “Tomb of Sleep, says this cemetery—every cemetery—where the graves have no other purpose than to offer the assurance of a stone or leaden sleep, a sleep of earth or ash, a sleep without sleep and without insomnia, without awakening and without intention, a limitless sleep: the infinite brought down to the rhythm of each finite existence.”45 Like Wordsworth, Nancy emphasizes the role of graves and epitaphs to memorialize the dead and points out that funeral rituals surrender them to a sleep that is not sleep at all but is nonetheless unique to the individual even when common—even when the dead are no longer anything but mere traces of themselves, “brought down to the rhythms of each finite existence.” In his elegiac turn to the sleep of death, Nancy repeats Wordsworth’s gesture when he insists in the Essays upon Epitaphs that the living need to be able to imagine both themselves and others as living on after death and that the epitaph provides the vehicle for such imaginary sur126  |  chapter six

vival. The fear of sleep at the heart of insomnia, Nancy suggests, is the fear of oblivion—death as a black hole, without memorial or afterlife, without utterance or even epitaph.46 Those graves, they have no words to utter. In Learning to Live Finally, Derrida both imagines that his writing has not even begun to be read and, contradictorily, fears that after his death “there will be nothing left ” except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries.47 He links this double imagining (at once gratifying and bleak) to his own spectral appearance and disappearance in the trace that is writing: The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it’s something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, “proceeds” from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing.48 Wordsworth’s biopoetics of life does not allow this rigorous adherence to the trace to surface in the same breath as his own fantasy of living on; for him the afterlife of writing summons up the fantasy of survival as overhearing and being overheard in the act of  breathing. Yet it is precisely in Derrida’s formulation that it becomes possible to say ( pace Nancy) not only “I am asleep” but “I am dead” or, rather, “I live my death in writing”—to write one’s own epitaph. The posthumous fate of the survivor is to go on being read and reread, to continue to be heard and overheard by the living, to leave a legacy and to have literary heirs. The close of Derrida’s last interview evades the pathos and plangency of “lastness” through its insistence on being read as a living discourse: “my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible.”49 For the lyric Wordsworth of 1802, the most intense life possible was a breathing life, or a life lived in lyric poetry—life, however, that can never be stayed as each line breathes on toward death: “Sweetness and breath with the quiet of death . . .”

the breath of life  |  127

chapter 7

“On the Very Brink of Vacancy” things unbeseen . . . on the very brink of vacancy Not more endangered than a man whose eye Beholds the gulph beneath. — William Wordsworth, The Excursion, 7.513–151 The blind man who does not see a danger that threatens him is the more courageous, and I am sure he would walk with firmer step over the narrow and elastic planks bridging a precipice. There are very few who are undismayed by the sight of abysses beneath them. — Denis Diderot, “Addition to the Preceding Letter” (Letter on the Blind; 1749)2

W

ordsworth’s fascination with the dizzy prospect of a blind man on the brink of a chasm is reassuringly recollected in his description of the blind man in book 7 of The Excursion, “not more endangered than a man whose eye / Beholds the gulph beneath” (7.513–15). But his language recapitulates a stranger and more disquieting moment in his early play The Borderers (1797–99) when the old, blind Herbert is led trustingly over a torrent by Mortimer, the man who later mistakenly leaves him to die of exposure. In Wordsworth’s drama, the word “vacancy” takes on metaphysical significance when the villain, Rivers, meditates on the swiftness of action (“a step, a blow”) in contrast to the obscure permanence of suffering that follows: “in the after vacancy / We wonder at ourselves like men betray’d” (The Borderers, 3.5.63–64). In the after-vacancy of his mistaken crime of omission, Mortimer is left hanging in anguish over the moaning torrent, looking round “with an eye that shewed / As if it wished to miss the thing it sought” (5.1.10–11).3 Wordsworth’s stage direction here refers to “an expression of vacancy in his eye,” as if Mortimer has blinded himself through his unwitting act of betrayal. The “thing” he seeks to see yet wants to miss is the sight of Herbert’s lifeless corpse. 128

Vacancy reappears in Home at Grasmere, where Wordsworth’s directions to himself include following where Milton’s poetic daring had led in Paradise Lost. The “blinder vacancy” scooped out by dreams, he insists, is nothing compared with the dizzy prospect presented by the mind of man: The darkest Pit Of the profoundest Hell, chaos, night, Nor ought of [blinder] vacancy scooped out By help of dreams can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us when we look Into our minds, into the mind of Man (Home at Grasmere, ll. 984–89)4 The dangerous gulf has become synonymous with the fear and awe engendered by the mind itself. Wordsworthian vacancy—both an unbalanced state of mind and a description of the mind’s unplumbed depths—can be temporal as well as spatial. In The Prelude, for instance, it signifies the yawning gap that separates present and past (“so wide appears the vacancy / Between me and those days” (Prel. 2.28–29), giving rise to the autobiographer’s characteristically divided self-representation. Wordsworth’s early poetry uses the word “vacant” not only sentimentally, to refer to the affective qualities of ambient gloom (“the tender, vacant gloom remains”; An Evening Walk, l. 387), but also to refer to the bleak inhospitality of the Alpine sublime (“vacant worlds where Nature never gave / A brook to murmur or a bough to wave”; Descriptive Sketches, ll. 372–73).5 Either way, there is something dismaying about vacancy. Wordsworth’s “abyss of idealism” in the Immortality Ode refers to losing touch with everyday “sense and outward things”—“Fallings from us, vanishings . . . / Moving about in worlds not realiz’d” (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 145–48).6 Although the unseeable is readily converted into visionary gain, the tension remains— between the visual purchase gained from “outward things” and the dangerous free-fall vacancy associated with things unseen. Wordsworth might be called the negative phenomenologist of Romantic thingness: however much palpable and visible things matter in his poetry, they are crowded out by what The Prelude calls “an obscure sense / Of possible sublimity” (Prel. 2.336–37). As a way to explore the “vacancy” of blindness and its implications for Wordsworth’s poetics, I will turn to Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1990), where relations between blindness and drawing, and between seeing and not seeing, intersect poignantly with the mode of the autobiographical memoir. “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  129

In the course of reflecting on the blind—including the (self-)unseeing eye of the draftsman—Derrida invokes both the legacy of phenomenology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late work The Visible and the Invisible (1962) and Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749). The first invites a posthumous rereading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, while the second offers an Enlightenment perspective on both visual perception and the Enlightenment quarrel between idealism and empiricism. Each in its own way complicates ideas about forms of knowledge derived from the senses, positing that the mind may be the ultimate source of what we know about things. Together, they situate Derrida’s more personal inquiry in the long aftermath of Enlightenment philosophic discussion of blindness set in motion by the provocative inclusion of “Molyneux’s question” in the 1694 edition of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding: “Suppose a Man born blind . . .”7 Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind is centrally concerned with the relations among writing, drawing, and self-portraiture. I will later turn to a more recent partnering of poet and draftsman, W. G. Sebald’s and Jan Peter Tripp’s collaboration on the theme of eyes and portraiture in Unrecounted (Unerzählt; 2003). The negative in their title, like the word “unbeseen” coined by Derrida’s translators (on the analogy of “unbeknownst”), suggests that only through the lens of negativity, or by means of an assumed or unknowing blindness—“on the very brink of vacancy”—do certain kinds of knowledge become available to us.8 The subject of this essay, therefore, is not the wellworked deconstructive paradoxes of Romantic blindness and insight, nor even what Derrida calls “this too-much of sight at the heart of blindness.” Rather, the too-much, or “troppo,” in Wordsworth’s poetry scoops out vacancy as a trope for negative seeing. In what follows I propose to trace a connection between abyssal sight and—in place of the mind’s sublimity—the equally dismaying, hard-to-see aspect of the human thing.9

The Archivist of Invisibility Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind refers to the Christ-cured blind man as “an archivist of visibility—like the draftsman.”10 His vocation is to bear witness to miraculously restored sight, hence to faith. Derrida himself is less interested in what the blind man is enabled to see than in the draftsman’s engagement with blindness as he lays his seeing finger on the blind man’s eye. The gesture repeats not only Christ’s healing of the blind but Tobias’s healing of his father’s eyes; with the Enlightenment, Derrida posits, medical cures for cat130  |  chapter seven

aract led to the desacralization of blindness and concurrent developments in the education of the blind.11 Derrida’s visual history of blindness, however, contains a more personal history. Apropos of his own orientation toward writing rather than drawing, he reveals a fratricidal element in his family romance: his admired and envied brother could draw, so he chose writing instead as the sign of his own secret election: “As if, in place of drawing, which the blind man in me had renounced for life, I was called by another trait, this graphics of invisible words . . . as if I had said to myself: as for me, I will write, I will devote myself to the words that are calling me.”12 Writing remains his preferred medium, although he never quite gives up (on) drawing, since the unconscious never gives up anything. Derrida defines at the outset two “logics” of invisibility at the origin of drawing: the transcendental, on the one hand, and the sacrificial or punitive, on the other. The first is the condition of possibility for drawing itself; the second, its thematization or representation, as in the biblical narrative or spectacle of the blind. Derrida might have added a third “logic,” that of mourning: the word deuil haunts his story of the eye as well as his unconscious relation to drawing. The work of mourning surfaces indirectly elsewhere—for instance, in his dream of a “duel” between two blind men, as well as in grief for his elderly, blind mother. This trajectory leads him to cite the concluding lines of Marvell’s poem “Eyes and Tears” at the end of his own Memoirs of the Blind—“These weeping eyes, / Those seeing tears”—to which he adds his own refrain: “Tears that see . . . Do you believe?—I don’t know, one has to believe . . .”13 Skepticism is vested in eyes that are unblinded by tears. Derrida resists the temptation to offer Memoirs of the Blind as “the journal of an exhibition”—that is, as an account of putting together the exhibition of drawings he was invited to select from the Louvre’s collections. But he does not resist the pun on the museum’s name in his provisional title: “L’ouvre où ne pas voir” (The open where not to see).14 We are encouraged to read his Memoirs of the Blind as a personal memoir, with its confessional moments and its reflections on the impossibility of self-portraiture. In this it resembles The Prelude, among other autobiographical works. Like Wordsworth, Derrida defines his memoir as a specific form of autobiography: the selfwriting or self-representation of a writer whose devotion to words involves a necessary form of blindness—the inability ever to see himself other than half-obscured by cataract-like layers of recollection, reflection, and narcissism. It is as if the drawings and self-portraits Derrida accumulates are so many films to be peeled off the cataract-dulled eye of the autobiographer, “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  131

leaving the ability to weep, but not see, as their potentially healing residue. Disability haunts his memoir. Like the blind sculptor whose eyes are at his fingertips, Derrida writes without seeing, making notes in the night or while driving his car “as if a lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers”—unreadable scribbles that serve him as an aide-mémoire.15 Early on in the project, Derrida suffers from an inflammation of the facial nerve that afflicts his left eye (“horrible to behold in a mirror”) and prevents it from blinking, thereby depriving it of the moment of blindness, or clin d’oeil, that helps the eyes to see by bathing them in tears.16 His dream of the duel of two blind men at each other’s throats, one of whom pursues him and grapples him to the ground, constitutes a Freudian moment; but the navel of the dream remains obscure. Though written down “with a groping hand” in the disorientated darkness of awakening, its Oedipal filiations are deliberately left dangling.17 Instead of unraveling the threads, Derrida prefers to confront both his readers and himself with “the unbeseen” and the “unbeknownst”—with the forgetting constitutive of memory: “the anamnesis of memory itself.”18 Un- (the sign of negativity) signifies an element in unconscious thought that can be uttered only through negation. If some knowns can be accessed only through the unknown, or some sights can be seen only by not being regarded, by the same token some elements of the visible can be accessed only via the invisible: “the visibility of the visible cannot, by definition, be seen.”19 Blindness is built into visibility. Derrida has at his own fingertips the notes accompanying MerleauPonty’s incomplete, posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible (1964)—a book that, he suggests, contains “a program for an entire rereading of the late Merleau-Ponty.”20 This form of nonvisibility “does not describe a phenomenon that is present elsewhere, that is latent, imaginary, unconscious, hidden, or past,” but is itself a phenomenon related to what Derrida calls “transcendentality,” or Merleau-Ponty’s “pure transcendence” at the limit of a phenomenology of the hidden: [May 1960]. When I say that every visible is invisible, that perception is imperception, that consciousness has a “punctum caecum,” that to see is always to see more than one sees—this must not be understood in the sense of a contradiction—it must not be imagined that I add to the visible . . . a nonvisible . . .—One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a nonvisibility.21 For Derrida, the punctum caecum, or blind spot, of the visual apparatus becomes an analogue for the paradoxical blindness of narcissism “at that 132  |  chapter seven

  figure 7.1. François Stella, Ruins of the Coliseum in Rome (1587). Pen and brown ink, brown wash, on paper. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

very point where [the subject] sees itself looking.”22 Memoirs of the Blind catches the observer in the act of (self-)observation, as the subject of selfportraiture, with its play on the “trait” or line that both enables and ambiguates drawing itself. At the heart of the self-portrait, Derrida finds ruin, or the collapse, ruination, and disintegration of the graphic image. His outlier instance is a Renaissance drawing by François Stella depicting the ruins of the Roman Coliseum (fig. 7.1)—the only representation of a ruin selected for the Louvre exhibition and a relatively early instance of this topos (melancholy reflections on the ruination of the past).23 Derrida introduces his own reflections on ruin with an all-encompassing conditional: “If what is called a selfportrait depends on the fact that it is called ‘self-portrait,’ an act of naming should allow or entitle me to call just about anything a self-portrait.”24 The implication is that not only naming but also the gesture of emptying out or impersonality are in themselves constitutive of self-portraiture. Derrida alludes to the Nobody (“personne” or outis) of Odysseus’s deceptive encounter with Polyphemus, a ruse that at once names and blinds.25 For Derrida “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  133

the self-portrait is “like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin.” And again: “The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin.”26 The self-portrait is what remains of this originary ruin—spectral, eaten away, metonymic: “For one can just as well read the pictures of ruins as the figures of a portrait, indeed, of a self-portrait.”27 The love of ruins is melancholic, narcissistic, and objectless—“Ruin is . . . this memory open like an eye, or like the hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.” A ruin is an aperture through which you see nobody and nothing. Love of ruins inserts itself in Derrida’s text in the guise of a graphic (eye-)socket that lets the viewer see “nothing of the totality that is not immediately opened, pierced, or bored through.”28 There is nothing to see here but the impossibility of self-portraiture—the impossibility of seeing oneself seeing, or seeing oneself as anything but a melancholy wreck. Derrida’s logic starts out by emphasizing biblical violence: the blinding of Samson, Saul blinded on the road to Damascus. But ruination involves a different kind of violence, connected with temporality rather than with sacrifice or conversion. The metaphorical blindness of the Bard haunts Romantic writing, via Miltonic and Homeric allusions that establish the poet as a visionary. But what if, like Derrida, one lingered instead on the melancholic ruin?—this sole representative of the nonhuman ruin in his extended galère of self-portrait drawings. Ruins are charged with pathology in Wordsworth’s “Incipient Madness” or else function as signifiers of human desolation in The Ruined Cottage (“four naked walls / That star’d upon each other”; ll. 31–32).29 The description of Furness Abbey in The Prelude responds more atmospherically to the past (“The shuddering ivy dripp’d large drops”; Prel. 2.131). But—leaving aside the remnants of Michael’s ruined sheepfold—the most autobiographically charged image of ruin in Wordsworth’s poetry is the “rugged Pile” of Peele Castle (fig. 7.2). Already an aestheticized representation of a representation (“Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont”), Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” mourns the loss of an earlier poetic vision untroubled by distress or disaster: “The light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration and the Poet’s dream” (ll. 15–16). Peele Castle is recollected as it was once seen or dreamed, mirrored in the sea of a halcyon summer (“I saw thee every day; and all the while / Thy Form was 134  |  chapter seven

  figure 7.2. Sir George Beaumont, Peele Castle in a Storm (1805). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Trust.

sleeping on a glassy sea”; ll. 3–4). Sight is held captive by a reflected image: “Whene’er I look’d, thy Image still was there; / It trembled but it never pass’d away” (ll. 7–8). The perfect calm of an unruffled sea—“a sea that could not cease to smile; / On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss” (ll. 19–20)— suggests an interior tranquility doubled by that of land and sky: an image of trembling but unruffled sensibility paints seer in perfect accord with idealized setting. In the wake of later distress, this “Elysian quiet, without toil or strife” (l. 24) is revealed as a false calm, the calm before a storm. John Wordsworth’s unanticipated drowning at sea brings an embattled vision that accords instead with the mood of Beaumont’s tempestuous picture. No longer sleeping on a glassy sea, Peele Castle now braves the elements with heroic obduracy: And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves. “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  135

Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The light’ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. (ll. 49–52) The vision that had previously held Wordsworth in a solitary sleep of imagination (“Hous’d in a dream, at distance from the Kind!”) is redefined as unforeseeing blindness: “Such happiness, wherever it be known, / Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind” (ll. 54–56). His awakening to the reality of the death-dealing sea brings “frequent sights of what is to be borne!” These sights include Beaumont’s “passionate Work,” with its laboring hulk, “rueful sky,” and “pageantry of fear!” (l. 48). In retrospect, Peele Castle’s glassy reflection is the sign of narcissism; the earlier image excludes temporality, along with danger, injury, “rue” (regret)—and fear above all. The specular register associated with mirroring gives way to a sense of bodily and affective vulnerability; both poet and ruin acquire or require “the unfeeling armour of old time” if they are to survive what temporality and disaster bring. Endurance and unfeeling oppose suffering and trauma, including the wound to narcissism dealt by a brother’s death. Derrida associates the ruin with Narcissus looking into his pool. This may be the moment to return to Stella’s drawing of the ruined Roman Coliseum. When Derrida describes “memory open like an eye” and continues “or like the hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all,” he seems almost to be referring to the multiple apertures and intricate architecture of the eyeless skull suggested by Stella’s drawing of the Coliseum. This moment of half-glimpsed figuration—a ruin is like a skull that shows you nothing but absence, no one, personne, nothing at all—rudely shatters the subject’s illusion of being a total someone, “the all.” But this shattering occurs through a reading of ruination that is itself strikingly specular, even concrete. Derrida’s half-glimpsed recourse to the ruin as a visual figure for death—a skull or memento mori—doubles and shadows representation itself. For a moment, a drawing is read as if it were a delusion, as something “unbeseen,” something that in theory ought to elude representation altogether: namely, death. Derrida’s reflection on the impossibility of self-portraiture—“whose signatory sees himself disappearing before his own eyes the more he tries desperately to recapture himself in it”—installs the self-portrait in time as the memory of an already-ruined past, lost through too much seeing or what he calls “an excess of lucidity”: “Thoughtful memory and ruin of what is in advance past, mourning and melancholy, the specter of the instance (stigme) 136  |  chapter seven

and of the stylus, whose very point would like to touch the blind point of a gaze that looks itself in the eyes and is not far from sinking into those eyes, right up to the point of losing its sign through an excess of lucidity.”30 Selfportraiture involves an act of self-reflection in which the self-unseeing signatory looks itself in the eyes and is lost to sight. The subject in time becomes the self-unseeing “subject” of autobiography. The ruin is a topos for what the self-regarding individual can never fully foresee, but can see only in hindsight: the spectacle of its own mortality. The experience of such spectacular unforeseenness is itself fearful. As Derrida writes, when fear is given over to spectacle, “the subject of the self-portrait becomes fear, it makes itself into fear, makes itself afraid.”31 Peele Castle can be read as Wordsworth’s elegy for this missed fearfulness—for the blindness of having lacked, not sight, but foresight and, with it, fear. Freud puts this failure of prevision at the origin of trauma when he attributes it to lack of preparedness or of premonitory anxiety.32 The subject of self-portraiture is retrospectively marked by its avoidance of trauma—the missed encounter signified for Wordsworth by his vision of a smiling sea. Both being and beholding are utterly transformed in the catastrophic aftermath of his elegy: “Not for a moment could I now behold / A smiling sea and be what I have been” (ll. 37–38).33 Elsewhere, Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs allude to shipwreck: “destruction of the Mariner’s hopes” and “the bones of drowned Men heaped together” under the surface. In the aftermath of trauma, the seer comes face-to-face with the “hideous and confused sights” beneath the sea: “The image of an unruffled Sea has still remained; but my fancy has penetrated into the depths of that Sea.”34 The self-mirroring summer sea gives way to the hideous sights of death and dissolution—the ruin of self-representation.

“Men Who See Not as We See” Protected by his sensitive hearing, the blind man of Wordsworth’s Excursion is “not more endangered” than a man who can actually see into the abyss. Wordsworth describes his blind man (buried alongside the deaf Dalesman in the Churchyard in the Mountains) on the heels of an invocation to a bountiful “Thing,” namely, Light: “Soul-cheering Light, most bountiful of Things! / Guide of our way, mysterious Comforter!” (7.499–500). Corporeal light may have been withheld, but this uncomplaining man has providential guidance and mysterious comfort. The earth provides a storehouse of knowledge: he is at once a natural scientist—botanist, geologist, oceanographer, “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  137

astronomer—and a moral philosopher. The Wanderer calls him “A noble— and, to unreflecting minds, / A marvelous spectacle” (7.533–34). The “spectacle” that he offers provides proof of a theory “that faculties, which seem / Extinguished, do not, therefore, cease to be” (7.536–37). The lost faculty of sight has been mysteriously transferred from sense to mind. Wordsworth’s seeing blind man is a redemptive instance: “Darkness is banished from the realms of Death.” As he reminds his readers, in ancient times “the men who see not as we see” were prophets and poets. The Excursion’s short and wishful history of the blind culminates in the Wanderer’s rhetorical question about philosophic poetry: “know we not that from the blind have flowed . . . wisdom married to immortal verse?” (7.546, 551–53). Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See comes to the diametrically opposite conclusion. Blindness is the basis for a demonstration, not of Providence, let alone intelligent design, but of botched creation, extinct life forms, and lawless chaos. Nor is there any question of a miraculous transfer of faculties from sense to mind. Yet even in the Christian Excursion, the Miltonic prototype of the blind poet merges with the spectacle of the Enlightenment natural philosopher. Wordsworth’s blind man resembles the figure invoked by Diderot himself: Nicholas Saunderson, the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge who lectured on mathematics, astronomy, and optics during the first half of the eighteenth century despite his blindness.35 Saunderson, who also makes a brief appearance in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, plays a significant role in Diderot’s Letter on the Blind. His ventriloquized deathbed dialogue draws on Heraclitus to argue movingly against intelligent design: what divine being can possibly have given eyes to one person but not to another? The argument from natural creation to intelligent creator looks very different to the unsighted: “O philosophers, travel with me to the confines of this universe . . . cast your eyes over this new ocean, and search in its aimless and lawless agitations for vestiges of that intelligent Being whose wisdom fills you with such wonder and admiration here!”36 In such strange seas of materialist thought, Diderot observes, “the great argument for the wonders of nature falls flat upon the blind.”37 Diderot’s fictional reference to a Dublin edition of The Life and Character of Dr. Nicholas Saunderson (his own atheistic invention) led to his threemonth imprisonment and to the banning of the Letter on the Blind during his lifetime. Yet it is Saunderson who, according to Diderot, “died as if he knew the light.”38 Blinded by smallpox at the age of one, the real-life Saunderson had received an exceptional education in classics and mathematics from his childhood on; when he came to Cambridge in his early 138  |  chapter seven

forties, he rapidly became celebrated as a teacher, despite his lack of a formal degree. On the dismissal of his predecessor, Whiston (who had failed in his misguided attempt to reconcile mathematics and the Trinity), Saunderson was unanimously appointed Lucasian Professor and retrospectively granted the necessary Cambridge degree. According to the Memoirs attached to his Elements of Algebra (1741), “A sense so little enjoyed was soon forgot: he retained no more idea of Light and Colours than if he had been born Blind.”39 Yet he excelled as a teacher. As Diderot relates, “He gave lessons in optics, he lectured on the nature of light and colours, he explained the theory of vision; he wrote on the properties of lenses, the phenomena of the rainbow, and many other subjects connected with sight and its organ.”40 Drawing on Saunderson’s memoir, Diderot gives an elaborate account of the ingenious system he had developed for arithmetic computation and measuring geometrical figures, using squares, pins, holes, and threads (fig. 7.3).41 For Diderot, the blind man had the peculiar advantage of an abstract relation to both language and things, inhabiting as he did the intellectual world of geometry, mathematics, and fixed systems of relation.42 When it came to speculative questions, he was not deceived by his sight into reasoning from his senses, as were philosophers and theologians who tried to reconcile science with religion. The faculty of touch vested in Saunderson’s fingertips created the blind man’s world: “the man born blind refers everything to his fingers’ ends, . . . he does not create an image.”43 From this premise Diderot proceeds satirically to turn everything (including metaphysics) upside down: “If ever a philosopher, blind and deaf from his birth, were to construct a man after the fashion of Descartes, . . . he would put the seat of the soul at the fingers’ ends, for it is from these that the greater part of the sensations and all his knowledge are derived. Who would inform him that his head is the seat of his thoughts? . . . I should not be surprised if, after a profound meditation, his fingers were as wearied as our heads.”44 Descartes illustrated his optics by putting eyes on sticks: for the blind man, the imaginary extension of touch replaces the reach of the eye; his fingertips become the seat of knowledge. Diderot’s exemplary figure, Saunderson, counters Berkeleyan idealism (we perceive ideas only in the mind) while at the same time critiquing Condillac’s Locke-derived sensationalism (the operations of the mind are based entirely on the senses)—two opposing views but “two enemies whose weapons are so much alike.” Diderot’s philosophy of the blind is a riposte to the blindness of idealist philosophy, “an extravagant system which should to my thinking have been the offspring of blindness itself.”45 “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  139

  figure 7.3. Nicholas Saunderson, The Elements of Algebra, in Ten Books, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1741), vol. 1, facing xxiv, figs. I and II. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library.

In Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, a speculative footnote identifies these two “blind” philosophers with the two dueling blind men of his dream.46 Diderot notes that Saunderson’s talk “abounded in happy expressions,” by which he means “using expressions to one sense (touch, for example) which are also metaphorical to another sense (say sight): as a result, a double light is shed on the subject for the listener, the direct light of the natural use of the expressions and the reflected light of the metaphor.”47 Saunderson provides a metaphor for Diderot’s own theory of language (both “natural”—or referential—and tropological), while blindness becomes a philosophic device to criticize the two blind philosophers against whom he argues: one privileging ideas, the other privileging the senses. Diderot’s account explicitly invokes painting in relation to Saunderson’s sensitivity to touch: “Saunderson . . . saw by means of his skin, and this in140  |  chapter seven

tegument of his was so keenly sensitive that with a little practice he could certainly have recognized the features of a friend traced upon his hand. . . . Thus the blind have likewise a painting, in which their own skin serves as the canvas.”48 Diderot’s fanciful analogy is based on the eighteenth-century model of sight as perfectly miniaturized images or “the picture formed on the ground of [the] eye” (elsewhere, he writes, “represented at the back of the eye”).49 His “Addition” to the Letter on the Blind gives an account of an exceptionally articulate blind woman who supposes that “the eye is a living canvas of infinite delicacy,” formed on the analogy of the skin: “If the skin of my hand was as sensitive as your eye, I should see with my hand as you see with your eyes, . . . I sometimes imagine there are animals who have no eyes, but can nevertheless see.”50 Sight (as Diderot defines it) becomes the most exact and exacting of miniature painters, confusing even the sense of touch with its unrivaled vraisemblance. The chief phenomena of vision mean that there is no painter of such skill as to rival the beauty and exactness of the miniatures which are painted in the back of your eyes; that there is nothing more exact than the likeness of the representation to the object itself; that the canvas of this picture is not so very small, that there is no confusion among the various forms, and that they occupy about a square half-inch; and that nothing is more difficult to explain than how the sense of touch would begin to teach the eye to see where the use of the latter organ is absolutely impossible without the aid of the former.51 Here Diderot’s account opens a seemingly unbridgeable gap—one might call it a vacancy—not only between touch and vision but also between seeing and representation, or between visual apparatus and mimesis. Painters have sought to close this gap since the mythical origins of painting in trompe l’oeil—whether Butades tracing the profile of her lover, the myth of drawing’s origin as shadow writing, or the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios to create the most deceptively realistic representation of things.52 Diderot’s point is that the blind know as much as anyone about vision—indeed, more than the philosophers. Derrida is not much interested in trompe l’oeil for its own sake, although his Memoirs of the Blind selects a striking example in Jean-Marie Faverjon’s mid-nineteenth-century Self-Portrait in Trompe l’Oeil.53 Faverjon’s pastel frames the painter’s head and arm protruding from a frame within the painting, while he points with his index finger to another picture whose raised, eyelid-like curtain contains yet another picture overflowing into the space of his (own) picture frame.54 This witty self-portrait with its play on the frame occasions Derrida’s meditation “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  141

on the hesitation or oscillation—elsewhere he calls it a “fold”—between the two logics (“transcendental” and “sacrificial”) that structure his Memoirs of the Blind and lead to the theme of deception. But Faverjon’s phantasmic selfportrait is almost too clever. Derrida wants the blind man to be, as he puts it, “subject to being mistaken, the subject of mistake.”55 He is less interested in trompe l’oeil’s deliberate deception than in unwitting error—narcissism, the mistake that lies in wait for the self-unseeing. At this point, I want to pursue the question of trompe l’oeil in a direction not taken by Derrida. What happens when the draftsman draws the eye itself in such a way that it looks deceptively like a photograph, when the eye ceases to be an organ of sight, like the artist’s, and instead is described as if it were an unsighted thing? Can one call such calculated effects “selfportraiture,” or is this something else altogether? I have in mind the collaboration between W. G. Sebald and the artist Jan Peter Tripp, his lifelong friend, in Unrecounted (the German, unerzählt, or “untold,” includes the ambiguous sense of “countless” or measureless). Tripp’s thirty-three lithographs are accompanied by Sebald’s micropoems.56 Drawing attention to Sebald’s habit of photographing acutely observed detail—his “sharp camera eyes”—Michael Hamburger introduces his translation of Unrecounted with careful reticence, saying only, “The eyes of all these subjects could never have met in a single place or time. All of them belong to a complex of relations shared by the artist and writer.”57 The fold (literally, facing pages) at once connecting and severing eyes and text is that of drawing and writing (seeing and reading). Each meticulously framed pair of eyes is identified in the contents page but left to be recognized (or not) on the facing pages of the book’s paired lithographs and poems. These eye-portraits—the eyes of writers such as Burroughs, Borges, Proust, and Beckett and of painters such as Bacon, Newman, Rembrandt, Hamilton, and Johns—include a pair of self-portraits or mutual reflections: the eyes of the artist Jan Peter Tripp and the writer W. G. Sebald. Other friends and intimates include Sebald’s translator, Michael Hamburger, and Sebald’s dog, Maurice (Moritz). Sebald’s essay on Tripp’s work alludes to the well-known contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios (Zeuxis’s lifelike grapes versus Parrhasios’s deceptively painted curtain).58 But it also describes his art as “pushed to the limits of the possible or—so it seems to the viewer—beyond them.” Apropos of Tripp’s “deeply searching objectivity,” Sebald defines his art of portraiture as “a pathographic enterprise.” Tripp’s hyperreality suggests an illusionist’s skill, but his portraits cross the dividing line between the meticulous rec­ ord of facial features and something stranger, altogether more interior, that 142  |  chapter seven

  figure 7.4. Jan Peter Tripp, Jan Peter Tripp (2003), from W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: New Directions, 2004). Lithograph. © Jan Peter Tripp/Carl Hanser Verlag.

Sebald calls “deformations wrought in the subject by pressure of work and inner stress.”59 The eyes of Tripp’s self-portrait (fig. 7.4) stare sideways with a wild, uncoordinated look, as if at some startling recollected sight—perhaps the scene described by Sebald’s accompanying poem: “When light­ ning // flashes drove down / one could see the deeply / folded mountains / & torrential rain / splashed down on the valley.”60 Each crease in the network of lines beneath Tripp’s eyes, every vein in the whites of his eyes revealing the strain of visual attention, the exaggerated startle of his slightly uncoordinated eyes, turn self-portraiture into the pathographic capture of a man who does not see as we see—perhaps because (like lightning) his gaze illuminates an internal landscape evoked by the dramatic weather effects of Sebald’s accompanying text. Sebald himself is as careful to differentiate Tripp’s work from the deceptions of trompe l’oeil as from photorealism. But death enters the picture. In contrast to Cartier-Bresson’s photorealism or Roland Barthes’s “residue of a life perpetually perishing,” he sees an art in which “life’s closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.”61 Tripp’s art deconstructs phenomenal forms; its tendency is analytic, modifying the photographs that are its starting point with the slightest of changes in focus: additions, reductions, foreshortenings, dislocations, deliberate or accidental errors. Quoting Gombrich on the inexhaustible, magnified detail in the art of Jan van Eyck, Sebald writes that the production of such perfect illusion depends on “a breathless state in which the painter no longer knows whether his eye still sees and his hand still moves”—an experience of failing breath and ever-increasing stillness “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  143

in the midst of concentration that approximates to paralyzing blindness: “the paralysis of limbs and blinding of eyes has brought death into the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp.”62 Tripp’s meticulous record of surfaces is deceptive: “behind the illusions of the surface a dread-inspiring depth is concealed.”63 Even a still life of green grapes becomes “a last sign of life,” while the white linen tablecloth might be spread on a coffin or catafalque. Tripp’s theme “is that of passing, past and lost time,” held in suspense by means of ephemeral moments and things as they are in Proust’s writing. Details in Tripp’s work “contain the whole of time,” taking on “the character of mementoes in which melancholy crystallizes itself.”64 Sebald could be writing of his own work, with its melancholy accumulation of detail and its memorial testimony of crystallized things. In Tripp’s concluding double portrait of Sebald (fig. 7.5), his heavylidded eyes (both with and without spectacles) and deeply seamed face at once reveal and conceal: spectacles gleam; eyelids droop; nothing is given away by this obscure and obscured gaze. Sebald’s epitaphic text heralds a postapocalyptic ending: “At the end // only so many will / remain as / can sit round / a drum.”65 The stretched skin of the drum—like the exquisitely sensitive skin of the blind man—bears the traces of an unseen picture, implying collective mourning or survival in some postapocalyptic moment. Tripp’s portrait and Sebald’s epitaph are equally opaque. By contrast, the portrait of Sebald’s dog Maurice (Moritz) is transparency itself, with its expressive gaze of devotion directed sidelong at an unseen object. Every soft hair of his pelt intimates the pleasures of caressing or being caressed by an animal, the texture of a moist nose made for sniffing and greeting (fig. 7.6). The dog becomes its master’s seeing eye, companionable and familiar as an old coat: “Please send me // the brown overcoat / from the Rhine valley / in which at one time / I used to ramble by night.”66 At the end of his essay on Tripp, Sebald refers to “the dog, bearer of the secret, who runs with ease over the abysses of time”—perhaps because, unlike temporally endangered humans, dogs are blind to time’s passing.67 The sidelong look of the dog is the measure of both its relation to the human—comfortingly familiar as an old coat—and its easy crossing of the abyss of time. The abyssal figure recurs in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006) when he writes that “as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man.”68 This abyssal gaze is as close as the human can come to seeing and knowing itself in depth, as seen and known by the other: the ahuman ends of man where he stands naked, unsupported and alone. 144  |  chapter seven

figure 7.5. Jan Peter Tripp, W. G. Sebald (2003), from W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: New Directions, 2004). Lithograph. © Jan Peter Tripp/Carl Hanser Verlag.

  figure 7.6. Jan Peter Tripp, Maurice (Moritz) (2003), from W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: New Directions, 2004). Lithograph. © Jan Peter Tripp/Carl Hanser Verlag.

In Unrecounted, Sebald’s text for Rembrandt’s eyes refers to Cézanne: “Like a dog // Cézanne says / that’s how a painter / must see, the eye / fixed & almost / averted.”69 The dog’s fixed and averted canine gaze becomes a model for the artist’s seeing: seeing by looking away. Sebald writes that Tripp’s adoption of this nonhuman regard (Merleau-Ponty’s “regard préhumain”) reverses the role of observer and observed: “Looking, the painter relinquishes our too facile knowingness; unrelatedly, things look across to us.” Consequently “one no longer knows who is looking and who is being looked at, who is painting and who is being painted.”70 In this shift of viewpoint where action and passion are inseparable, it becomes possible to look on even inanimate things as a mode of self-portraiture. For Sebald, Tripp’s natures mortes carry within them—as much as a suitcase or a book—their human history: What matters in Tripp’s still lifes is not that the painter applies his skill and mastery to a more or less fortuitous assemblage of objects but the autonomous existence of things to which, like blindly furious working animals, we stand in subordinate and dependent relationship. Because (in principle) things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experience they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.71 Like the dog Maurice/Moritz or an old overcoat, the things that carry their experience of us inside them know us better than we know ourselves; it is their owners who become “blindly furious working animals,” depending on things to open the book of their unremarked history. The Prelude describes how the moving picture of the London crowd becomes like a “second-sight procession” (Prel. 7.602), and the face of every passerby unreadable. This surfeit of spectacle culminates in a moment of sublime unreadability, the untoward sight of “a blind Beggar, who with upright face, / Stood propp’d against a Wall” (Prel. 7.612–13). The relation of this episode in the London book of The Prelude to the topos of autobiography has received ample commentary.72 Suffice to say that the opposition between reading and seeing makes the blind Beggar’s label an emblem, not just of “the utmost that we know,” but of the limits of self-representation. Like Sebald’s pareddown texts, the written paper that explains “The Story of the man and who he was” is attached to an image whose “fixed face, and sightless eyes” renders 146  |  chapter seven

both portraiture and self-portraiture inscrutable. Wordsworth’s appeal is to another-worldly world beyond sight: “I look’d, / As if admonished from another world” (Prel. 7.622–23). The blind London Beggar is not the only figure in The Prelude with sightless eyes. Paired with the blind Milton, whose presence presides over the Cambridge books (if not the entire poem), Louis-François Roubiliac’s 1755 statue of Newton (fig. 7.7)—“with his Prism and silent Face” (Prel. 3.59)— glimpsed by moonlight provides a counterweight to poetry: abstract knowledge in the form of geometry and mathematics.73 Ballasting poetry in the dream of the Arab Quixote, Euclid’s Elements is the stone that weds “man to man by purest bond / Of nature undisturb’d by space or time” (Prel. 5.105– 6). Elsewhere in The Prelude, geometry provides the defense of abstraction against “a mind beset / With images, and haunted by itself ” (Prel. 6.179–80). In the 1850 Prelude, Newton’s stony face becomes “The marble index” of a mind “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (1850 Prel. 3.62– 63), undeterred by the “aimless and lawless agitations” of the ocean in which Diderot’s Saunderson had so signally failed to find the vestiges of divine intelligence.74 Diderot’s trope of the Philosopher who “had put out his eyes in order to be the better acquainted with vision” suggests a Newton deprived (so to speak) of his optics.75 Roubiliac’s celebrated sculpture of Newton serves as a reminder that in Enlightenment philosophy, statuary itself could become an index of sensory deprivation. At exactly the same moment, Condillac’s post-Lockean Traité des sensations (1754) conducts its thought-experiment concerning the role of the senses by proposing a statue that possesses a soul but has been entirely deprived of sense impressions. One by one, its senses are unlocked in order to reveal the absence of innate faculties and ideas; language alone transforms sensation into mental faculties. Hence, for Condillac, as for Berkeley, our thoughts are limited to what we perceive.76 The atheistic implications of Condillac’s argument were left for Diderot to fictionalize in Saunderson’s pathetic deathbed speech. If blindness is not conducive to faith, any more than seeing is to believing (witness Derrida’s mantra in Memoirs of the Blind: “Do you believe?”), sensory deprivation opens up negative modes of knowing and seeing—even, as with Mortimer in The Borderers, a kind of negative hallucination (things both seen and “unbeseen”). Such seeing, however, does more than abolish unwelcome sights or turn the unthinkable into the unbeknownst; it leads us to the very brink of vacancy. The averted eyes of dog or draftsman, like the sightless eyes of beggar or mathematician, register how things look across to us when we are blind to them. That might be an “on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  147

figure 7.7. Louis-François Roubiliac, Sir Isaac Newton (1755). Trinity College, Cambridge. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

alternative way to read the blind London Beggar’s sign, “The Story of the man and who he was”—neither as a trope of autobiographical blindness nor as self-portraiture’s ruin but as Romanticism’s representation of the strangest thing of all: the human thing, glimpsed sidelong through the unseeing eyes of a dog.

“on the very brink of vacancy ”  |  149

chapter 8

Senseless Rocks A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study. — James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795)1 The Poets in their elegies and songs Lamenting the departed call the groves, They call upon the hills and streams to mourn, And senseless rocks, nor idly . . . — William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, ll. 73–762

T

he small, familiar noises of the body—its sighing and breathings, its interior pulsing—are seldom regarded as a form of expressive communication. Yet the sounding bodies of inanimate objects such as rocks are frequently anthropomorphized. If (like senseless rocks or like the hills and streams) we could not speak, let alone mourn, what language would we use? And how would we make sense of it? Walter Benjamin suggests that nature mourns for its post-Edenic muteness or else that nature’s very sadness renders it mute: “Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature.”3 But Wordsworth’s nature is neither fallen nor dumb; rather, it speaks a half-heard “ghostly language” from the ancient past: I would stand Beneath some rock listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds. (Prel. 2.326–29) Whether inspirational or menacing (“Breathings for incommunicable powers,” “Low breathings coming after me”; Prel. 3.188, 1.331), nature’s breath in The Prelude can also be mistaken for the prosaic sound of Wordsworth’s panting dog: “The off and on Companion of my walk” (Prel. 4.178). Lyrical Ballads goes so far as to make nature rhyme with the humming lips of happy idiocy: Johnny’s lips burr-burr-burr in tune with the “curring” owlets in 150

“The Idiot Boy.” But nowhere is this capacity of the purely physical body to become a source of expressive auditory effects more resonant than in the case of Wordsworth’s “senseless rocks.” Rocks provide the sounding board on which winds and waters—those other perennial elements in Wordsworth’s poetry—beat, blow, and whistle eerily or, as Wordsworth often writes, “sing.”4 The voice of nature tends to produce a posture of anxiously attentive listening on the part of the poet, testifying to the effort to make sense that forms part of both listening and (in a different register) reading. In Wordsworth’s early poetry, the wordless lamentations of rocks are funereal or supernatural dirges: “The wild rocks round her sing a wondrous Dirge.” Elsewhere, after Horace, the “hollow rock” is loquacious” or talkative.5 During the crossing of the Alps, rocks mutter and the “Black drizzling crags” of the Simplon Pass “spake by the way-side, / As if a voice were in them” (Prel. 6.562–64). Rocks are attached to pathetic or fatal tales—“From every rock would ‘hang a tale’” (Vale of Esthwaite, l. 353)—and hence they become surrogate narrators.6 They are often associated with anxiety and anticipation, like the wait that precedes the death of the poet’s father (“Long Long upon yon steepy rock / Alone I bore the bitter shock” (Vale of Esthwaite, ll. 278–79) or Leonard’s “untoward death among the rocks” in “The Brothers” (l. 153). When The Ruined Cottage calls upon “the senseless rocks” to mourn (“nor idly”), it identifies rocks not only with traditional pastoral lament, whether for the death of an individual or for an entire way of life, but with the voice of poetry: “Obedient to the strong creative power / Of human passion” (Ruined Cottage, ll. 416–17). Rocks behave like poets, sensible to human affects, stories, superstitions, and tragedies; unlike the tuneful shepherds of pastoral convention, they (and the poets) are anything but idle. As soon as rocks figure in Wordsworth’s poetry, we enter the realm of the epitaphic. Rocks provide the surface on which to write, tell, or “hang a tale,” inscribing memories onto the changing face of nature in the form of ruins, traces of unfulfilled hopes, or cursed spots (ruined cottages, unfinished sheepfolds, the fragmentary remains in “Hartleap Well,” whose waters groan in sympathy with animal suffering).7 But most of all, such memories are inscribed in the form of carved or monumental letters whose origins are linked to mysterious or even nonhuman agency. The domesticated rock is often, although not always, a “stone”—gravestone, hearthstone, or ruined sheepfold—that serves as a memorial to the human past. The rock, by a slender yet significant distinction, is more often appropriated for senseless rocks  |  151

figure 8.1. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; with Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1795), vol. 1, plate II. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

magical writing or writing from an ancient, monumental past. Nature’s own workings are written on the rocks; James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth graphically depicts striated granite rocks as inscribed with the protowriting of their origins: “They have not only separately the forms of certain typographic characters, but collectively give the regular lineal appearance of types set in writing” (fig. 8.1).8 In his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth notes that the initials W. (his own initial) and Y. are the characteristic shapes inscribed by the 152  |  chapter eight

erosion of torrential water on the rocky slopes of Lake District mountains, as if written by the hand of nature.9 In Wordsworth’s “Poems on the Naming of Places,” included in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, “Joanna’s Rock” echoes to the sound of impromptu laughter—“The rock, like something starting from a sleep, / Took up the Lady’s voice, and laugh’d again” (ll. 54–55). Uproarious merriment rebounds from peak to mountain peak in a litany of extravagant naming— Helm-crag, Hammar-Scar, Silver-How, Loughrigg, Fairfield, Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Glaramara, and Kirkstone. Wordsworth’s sonorous roll call invokes an anthropomorphized landscape. In memory of her magnified voice, the poet chisels Joanna’s name on the rock “like a Runic Priest, in characters / Of formidable size” (ll. 28–29).10 Her affectionate mockery—prompted by the poet’s rapt absorption in the variegated beauties of a single rock—is commemorated in larger-than-life-size runic letters, just as the mountain landscape temporarily becomes a vast megaphone for long-distance communication with itself: “old Skiddaw blew / His speaking trumpet” (ll. 62– 63). The poet’s naming of a rock invokes the ancient and inhuman clamor of an entire mountain range, dwarfing the intimate domestic raillery of Joanna’s laughter.11 Wordsworth’s note accurately identifies the ancient inscriptions of Cumberland and Westmoreland, not as runic, but as Roman.12 The mountains he names locate the scene among the familiar peaks encircling the Vale of Grasmere. But, he adds, besides the anthropomorphic rock “bear[ing] a striking resemblance to an Old Woman cowering” (for which “the ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag” is named), the nearby fissure or cavern is one of those known locally as “Dungeons.”13 Joanna, hearing the unexpected trumpeting of her laughter in the landscape’s natural echo chamber, draws closer to the poet’s side, as if afraid of the sounds released by her merriment.14 There is something at once mocking and imprisoning in this “brotherhood of ancient mountains,” with its wild uproar and runic associations. The poem is about the transformation of the human into the nonhuman in both scale and volume—the “characters / Of formidable size” chiseled by the poet or the amplified mountain echoes. But it is also about the way that writing transforms the small, familiar sound of a woman’s laughter into an inscription that resounds beyond the rock surface. As the poet’s uncouth letters speak across time, a small incident is relayed and enlarged for other listeners or readers. The occasional (or, rather, locational) poem becomes an echo chamber. The apparently slight “Poems on the Naming of Places” claim runic powers. The rock is a kind of book; the book “echoes” like a senseless rocks  |  153

rock. The chiasmus suggests a trope for the power of the printed page, as the poem leaps from reader to reader, crossing space and time, much as Joanna’s laughter leaps disconcertingly from crag to crag. In “To Joanna,” the strangeness of Wordsworth’s early rock dirges has only apparently been domesticated, surfacing in the uncanny jubilation of a suddenly alien mountain landscape. Even when it remains latent, however, the tendency of rocks to make sounds that are both more and less than human brings with it priestly or Druidic associations. Scaled up, Joanna’s laughter has cavernous reserves of meaning, obscure powers of mockery. I want to try to tease out these reserves in Wordsworth’s poetry, where “the ancient language of the earth” can also be faintly heard in the “voice” of poetry. Sound haunts writing much as orality haunts inscription, an incomprehensible aspect of language dissociated from written letters. Recitation (shouts, chants, or murmurs) creates a resonant bass-line in the body, just as rocks create a sounding board for the elements. The materiality of poetry lies not only in its inscription on page or rock but also in its physically embodied sound—breathing, pulsation, ululation—within the body’s echo chamber. What is the relation between sound and listening in Wordsworth’s poetry, or between senselessness and meaning? And why might studying rocks interest the philosopher?

Continuing Motionless Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” describes how, in a despondent mood, the poet comes upon an old man standing alone on the far side of a pond. The Leech Gatherer (“continuing motionless”) becomes a figure for both resistance and noncomprehension. “[F]ull in view,” he seems scarcely human—“endued with sense” yet unknowable, a natural wonder: As a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie Couch’d on the bald top of an eminence; Wonder to all who do the same espy By what means it could thither come, and whence; So that it seems a thing endued with sense: Like a Sea-beast crawl’d forth, which on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself (ll. 64–70)15 The title and the modified Spenserian stanza suggest allegory, but the Leech Gatherer—despite the poem’s title—conveys natural impassivity rather 154  |  chapter eight

than the qualities of resolution and independence that his esoteric calling appears to require.16 What is striking about this image (famously cited by Wordsworth himself as an instance of the give-and-take of animate and inanimate qualities in poetic language) is less its fancifulness (“like a Sea-beast crawl’d forth”) than its geological specificity: “As a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie . . .”17 The figure of the Leech Gatherer is an apparent exception to the taxonomy that distinguishes small-scale domestic markers from monumental rocks. As John Wyatt points out in Wordsworth and the Geologists, the isolated glacial erratic perched on an eminence has precise geological significance, reminding the informed viewer or reader of the infinitely slow crawl of ancient ice sheets across the landscape, which deposited huge rocks from other geological terrain as they flowed, inch by inch, age by age.18 Wordsworth’s sea-beast comparison also invokes the “diluvial” theory of the earth’s origin: ancient and repeated floods that once inundated the earth, laying down its alluvial layers—or, alternatively, the ruination of a previously Edenic earthscape by the once-and-for-all-time catastrophe of a Noachic flood.19 I want, however, to focus not so much on the late eighteenth-century geological controversy over the origins of the earth as on the Leech Gatherer’s motionlessness—his continued lack of movement and his murmuring, indistinct flow of speech. These are the qualities that signal his imperviousness and sheer resistance to making sense: Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth all together, if it move at all. (ll. 82–84) The old man does not hear (“heareth not”); he does not respond (or move, or speak) in a way that makes sense. The poet in turn hears his stream of conversation only as a sequence of meaningless sounds. His frame weighed down by “A more than human weight” (from pain or raging sickness), “not all alive nor dead, / Nor all asleep” (ll. 77, 71–72), the old man has all the outward signs and ambiguity of the undead elsewhere in Wordsworth’s poetry: he is “propp’d” like an inanimate object, and his look is fixed. Yet despite these signs of decrepitude, he manifests intelligent life: old magician that he is, he studies (“cons”) the surface of the muddy pond “As if he had been reading in a book” (l. 88), like a reader studying a page in order to understand it. His feeble words are solemn, lofty, and measured—“above the reach / Of ordinary men; a stately speech!” (ll. 102–3). senseless rocks  |  155

The Leech Gatherer’s lack of motion and measured speech turn out to be inseparable from his oneiric admonitory function: Like one whom I had met with in a dream; Or like a Man from some far region sent, To give me human strength and strong admonishment. (ll. 117–19) While the poet finds it hard to keep his mind on what the Leech Gatherer is actually saying—“In my mind’s eye I seem’d to see him pace / About the weary moors continually” (ll. 136–37)—the old man himself remains prosaically defined by his struggle for survival. How is he to “make a living” from his marginal calling? He lives only just this side of life. His slowness of motion and “propping” characterize similar figures in the Wordsworthian canon of deprivation, extremity, and old age. The skeletal Discharged Soldier in The Prelude is “propp’d” on a milestone by the roadside, “yet still his form / Kept the same steadiness, and at his feet / His shadow lay and mov’d not” (Prel. 4.423–25). Disturbed by the sight, the poet “wish’d to see him move; but he remain’d / Fix’d to his place” (Prel. 4.429–30). While he emits “a murmuring voice of dead complaint, / Groans scarcely audible” (Prel. 4.431–32), his gestures elicit the same word, “measur’d,” that Wordsworth uses of the Leech Gatherer’s speech. Like his, the Discharged Soldier’s “strange halfabsence” is that of indifference to life. To be indifferent about or half-absent from life—one’s own or another’s—sets these solitary figures at a tangent to the fluctuating moods and intermittent humanitarian concerns of the poet (themselves a kind of misreading of the figures he encounters). One might view their dehumanization as what recalls him to, or enforces, his own contrasting humanity. The fixity of the “unmoving” blind London Beggar in book 7 of The Prelude (also “propp’d”) has the same admonitory effect on the dazed spectator to whom London’s bustle has become similarly oneiric: “A second-sight procession, such as glides / Over still mountains, or appears in dreams” (Prel. 7.602–3). The ostensible role of Wordsworth’s derelicts is to make the poet pay better attention to his own life, as well as to the lives of others. But—moving with the collective anonymity of apparitions—they cross over into the realm of the barely human, taking the poet along with them. Such figures of extremity are often credited by Wordsworth with community-building powers; they promote the bonds of pity and elicit small acts of feel-good charity. But critics have often commented on their obstinate otherworldliness, not156  |  chapter eight

ing—if not satirizing—the poet’s tendency to go into a daze when they tell him about their physical hardships.20 I want, however, to pursue the question of “measure.” What exactly is “measured” (or measurable) in the speech and movements of these slowpaced figures? When does motion become so gradual as to become stillness, or human life so indifferent to itself as to become senseless? In the context of scarcely moving old age—figures like the Old Man Traveling or the Old Cumberland Beggar—motion is calibrated as stasis or mindless repetition. The subtitle of “Old Man Traveling” is “Animal Tranquility and Decay, a Sketch.” This vignette of traveling immobility—the very birds ignore the old man as he passes—is assimilated not just to peace (“tranquility”) but to decay. Like his limbs, looks, and bending figure, his face, step, and gait express not so much pain as thought; yet simultaneously he is said to be “insensibly subdued / To settled quiet” (ll. 7–8). Does he think at all? His mild composure is impossible to distinguish from lack of feeling: “the young behold / With envy, what the old man hardly feels” (ll. 13–14). The slippage in Wordsworth’s slipped-in “hardly” covers a wealth of unspecified insensibility. This twenty-line “Sketch” includes a slender tale about the purpose of the old man’s journey: “Sir! I am going many miles to take / A last leave of my son, a mariner” (ll. 17–18). But it seems scarcely credible that his slow travels should have a destination, let alone that he could tell a story. His patience is paradoxical; his animal tranquility hyperbolic. In “The Old Cumberland Beggar”—subtitled “A Description”—arrested motion and recurrence similarly become the measure of bare life. The word “extinct” surfaces tellingly in the poem’s head-note: “The class of Beggars to which the old man here described belongs, will probably soon be extinct. It consisted of poor, and, mostly, old and infirm persons, who confined themselves to a stated round in their neighbourhood, and had certain fixed days, on which, at different houses, they regularly received charity, sometimes in money, but mostly in provisions.”21 Nominally, extinction refers to state takeover of communal acts of local charity. The regulated handouts of a centralized welfare system threaten not just to interrupt the social bond but to confine the aged, the destitute, the out-of-work, and the infirm in a “House, misnamed of Industry”—inserting the free-range individual into a forced-labor economy. But the word “extinct” also evokes theories of life: for instance, the extinction of entire classes or species of creatures contained in the fossil record, a phenomenon that raised such intractable questions for late senseless rocks  |  157

eighteenth-century geologists and theologians. If the world is visibly decaying, can it be renovated?22 While the Leech Gatherer records the infinite slowness of glacial time, the Old Cumberland Beggar is a measure of the contrastingly rapid pace of social change (and travel) experienced even during the poet’s lifetime. Sitting on “a low structure of rude masonry,” he scans his meal of scraps “with a fix’d and serious look / Of idle computation” (ll. 11–12), much as the Leech Gatherer “cons” the muddy water by which he makes his bare living. The beggar’s shaking hand scatters crumbs, while the birds, “Not venturing yet to peck their destin’d meal, / Approached within the length of half his staff ” (ll. 20–21). The old man’s slow trudge—“him even the slow-paced wagon leaves behind”—makes the horseman stop to put his alms in his hat, and the toll-gate attendant quits her spinning to lift the latch as he passes, while the postboy shouts a warning or pulls his vehicle off the road. These small acts of care are elicited by a rate of travel overtaken by the speed of the modern highway: On the ground His eyes are turn’d, and, as he moves along, They move along the ground; and evermore, Instead of common and habitual sight Of fields with rural works, of hill and dale And the blue sky, one little span of earth Is all his prospect. (ll. 45–51) His “little span of earth” defines the measure of the old man’s life as his downturned eyes pass mechanically over the ground, “seeing still, / And never knowing that he sees” pieces of straw, scattered leaves, or the marks of wheels or carriages “Impress’d on the white road, in the same line, / At distance still the same” (ll. 53–54, 57–58). The parallel imprint of the carriage wheels, tracing the progress of the old man’s sightless eyes along the ground, have their own parallel in the mechanical progress of the reader’s eyes along lines of blank verse, at once seeing and not seeing the marks on the page. Unlike the old man, the reader strains to make sense of one-off or repeated signs. Wordsworth calls the beggar “a record which together binds / Past deeds and offices of charity” (ll. 81–82). But the imaginary community his passing supposedly binds is already a thing of the past, and the subtler rhythms of Wordsworth’s poetry 158  |  chapter eight

void the record. “The Old Cumberland Beggar” is not so much hortatory as performative; it presents an alternative mode of consciousness as pure, mechanical recurrence and even as the temporary suspension of meaning altogether. When Wordsworth asks us to “Reverence the hope whose vital anxiousness / Gives the last human interest to his heart” (ll. 170–71), he is asking us to credit a residual instinct for survival that is on a par with the birds’ busy scavenging for crumbs. Physical privation and struggle with the elements—gifted to him by the poet—become the measure of his near oblivion. This is a life answerable (as the poet might wish even his own to be) to no one but himself: “he appears / To breathe and live but for himself alone” (ll. 157–58). “Slow motion” is a measure, among other things, of the art of time and its technological slowing down in the face of speeding modernity: one could call it “slow art,” on the analogy of slow food or slow research, or even the slow turn and return of the Wordsworthian blank-verse line. Tacita Dean’s 2008 film Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in Three Movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4′33″ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (Six Performances; Six Films) memorializes the stillness of a famous dancer and choreographer, arrested in a series of minutely varied seated poses and replicated in simultaneously projected films (fig. 8.2).23 The lapse of time in John Cage’s silent three-movement composition of 1952 is reflected in a mirror, the last seconds of each movement counted out by Trevor Carlson as he “conducts” the piece. Cage, Merce Cunningham’s longtime partner, died in 1992. Cunningham’s own death in 2009 adds a further memorial dimension to Dean’s slow-paced, single-shot, 16-millimeter analogue films. Cunningham is positioned in each so that he can be seen life-size, in all his motionless impassivity; a close-up records every blink and tremor of movement in his otherwise inexpressive face. Parallel installation performances bind the vanished past of arrested movement to the repetition of memorial feeling in the present (fig. 8.3). STILLNESS captures the sound of time passing in what Dean herself calls “the prickled silence of mute magnetic tape or the static on a record.”24 Captured in Cunningham’s “performance,” ambient noise—amplifying the silent music of Cage’s original composition—subsumes the sound of the recording apparatus into the stillness of Dean’s title. We not only see time passing, whether in the holding still of a dancer or in the conductor’s countdown, but also hear it. Like other films by Dean that memorialize ghostly presences or half-absences—such as the obsolescent listening devices senseless rocks  |  159

figure 8.2. Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in Three Movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4′33″ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (Six Performances; Six Films). Six 16 mm color films with optical sound. Courtesy of Tacita Dean and the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London.

positioned on the Kent coast in Sound Mirrors (1999)—STILLNESS records the strange afterlife of things and people.25 Temporal slowing captures the present as it slips inexorably into the past, second by second.26 Recording equipment performs the same function as rocks in Wordsworth’s poetry, providing both sounding board and amplifier. Recording, playback, and mirroring create a layered memorial that replicates the act of performance in the slowed-down watching and listening required of the viewer—six times 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Through the noise of the recording apparatus, the films’ slow passage composes their own posthumous tribute to silence and lack of motion. Like the slow-paced passage of Wordsworth’s old men, Dean’s STILLNESS attunes us to the slow accumulation that is memory’s record of time past in the ever-ticking present.

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figure 8.3. Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in Three Movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4′33″ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (Six Performances; Six Films). Six 16 mm color films with optical sound. Installation view at Dia:Beacon, NY, 2008. Photo by Ken Goebel. Courtesy of Tacita Dean and the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Making Sense In Listening (À l’écoute; 2002) the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that hearing and understanding, or making sense, are semantically linked—via the verb entendre—to the idea of sense perception itself and hence to subjectivity. “Every sensory register,” he writes, “thus bears with it both its simple nature and its tense, attentive, or anxious state,” including listening. Hence, “to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible.”27 Tension and intention intersect. For Nancy, there is always something edgy and obscure about listening: To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin—at least the sound that is musically listened to, that is gathered and scrutinized for itself, not, however, as an acoustic phenomenon (or not merely as one) but as a resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance.28 Sound, he continues, not only spreads in space but resonates internally— “still resounding ‘in me,’ as we say.” Sound goes both ways: “To sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself,” to emit sounds as a sonorous body, but it also refers back to itself, as interior resonance.29 By invoking the “inside” of the subject, sound creates interiority. Nancy observes that sentir (to sense) and re-sentir (to perceive) are linked not only to each other but also to the reflexive verb, se sentir—that is, to the sense perception that enables one to feel oneself a subject in relation to the ambient sensory or auditory environment. Musical spacing, recurrence, and resonance—like the pregnant intervals in which the poet thinks he hears the panting of his dog, or the intervals between the boy’s hooting and the owls’ reply—signal the coming into existence of interior subjectivity: “A subject feels: that is his characteristic and his definition.” In this way, “to be listening will always, then, be to be straining toward or in an approach to the self.”30 Listening strains toward subjectivity in The Prelude. Sounds apprehended on the edge of meaning—external to the self, like “the ghostly language of the ancient earth”—allow the poet (and poetry) to identify with internal noises and silences. For Nancy, the subject is always emitter as well as receiver—“creator and receiver both” (“Tintern Abbey,” l. 303). The “‘acoustic oto-emissions’ produced by the inner ear of the one who is listening” are also auto-emissions, as the self becomes a sounding board for 162  |  chapter eight

the automatic noises of the listening apparatus. The audible is always mingled with the inaudible; the noises we make become part of those we hear. The ear sings, breath comes and goes, the heart beats time; even in silence, “you hear your own body resonate, your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave.”31 This cavernous interior silence is what we hear in the intervals of listening. Voice is understood by Nancy as “what sounds from a human throat without being language, which emerges from an animal gullet or from any kind of instrument, even from the wind in the branches: the rustling towards which we strain to lend an ear.”32 These sounds are characterized by their indistinguishability, like the stream of words emitted by the Leech Gatherer. The straining after meaning as the auditor “listens” for poetic sense anticipates the moment when what emerges from the human throat becomes language to which we strain to lend an ear. We listen, as Nancy puts it, to the silence of meaning, or sens: “Sense opens up in silence.”33 Challenging the idea of presence, voice becomes the condition of both writing and otherness. The body is an echo chamber for what resonates beyond meaning, while the subject (like the poet) listens “or vibrates with listening to—or with the echo of—the beyond-meaning.” Nancy identifies this Derridean archi-écriture as the mental speaking or interior vocalizing that precedes writing.34 Writing and understanding both depend on endowing the body with sense as it becomes resonant in the act of listening: “resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens.”35 The listening body resonates with poetry’s ghostly sound effects. Wordsworth’s early gothic fragments—rhyming “ear” and “hear”—incline to frantic lamentation: “wild lone wailings,” “the wind’s wailing song,” “the hollow howling blast,” and so on.36 Listening is allied to disquiet in The Borderers, typically in the context of moral uncertainty associated with a precipitous stance (“hung / Listening above the precipice”; 2.3.41–42). Suspended listening becomes receptivity as the Winander Boy waits for the owls to return his call: “and sometimes, while he hung / Listening a gentle shock of mild surprise” (“There was a Boy,” ll. 18–19). What he hears in this moment of suspense is not just the voice of mountain torrents but the gentle shock of unanticipated death that later silences the poet: “near his grave / A full half-hour together I have stood / Mute” (ll. 30–32).37 Listening comes most fully into its own in The Prelude, with the poet’s “listening to sounds that are / The ghostly language of the ancient earth” (Prel. 2.327–28). The song of the Solitary Reaper—“O listen! For the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound” (“The Solitary Reaper,” ll. 7–8)—poses a question: senseless rocks  |  163

does she sing of “old, unhappy, far-off things” or “Familiar matter of today”? Either way, the thirsty listener is “filled” by her song: “I listen’d till I had my fill” (ll. 19, 22, 29). The child of The Prelude drinks in pleasure from waters, mists, and clouds: “drinking in / A pure organic pleasure from the lines”—of what?—“/ Of curling mist” (Prel. 1.591–93). Listening is like slaking one’s thirst with water. In these lines from The Prelude, for a brief moment, drinking becomes synonymous with the organic pleasure of the verse line. From frantic banshee wails to the pleasures of poetry: how does the outside get into the inside, or the sense into the line, other than through this metaphorical drinking? An entire aesthetic theory can be (indeed, has been) derived from The Prelude, Wordsworth’s poem on the growth of the poet’s mind.38 Its philosophic project anticipates Nancy’s eschewing of traditionally abstract concepts—although, to be sure, he does so with an acute sense of phenomenology’s philosophic vicissitudes.39 One might call it literary philosophy, or even “poetic” philosophy, predicated as it is on unregarded everyday experiences like bodily sensing (listening) and unconscious bodily states (sleep). From impermeable rocks to porous infancy, from senselessness to “sense”: the associative trajectory sketched above suggests how fully Wordsworth metabolizes the untoward or indeterminate aspects of sound along with the familiar, daily experiences that inform the sensate, embodied human being. As Freud long ago observed, the self is fundamentally constituted by means of a bodily ego or, rather, by means of what is felt to be inside and what is felt to be outside—what is internalized or angrily spat out. To this he adds an important third term, projection, whereby unwelcome feelings are ejected onto others.40 The boundaries of the self are constantly in flux, crossed, or permeated. Its border is never fixed, any more than the sense of self. The indigestible elements in our internal experience are forcibly projected onto (or into) our objects. Rocks, therefore, serve to demarcate the porous boundaries and erratic movements of selving, as well as the fluctuating limits of sense. The capacity to internalize something as indigestible as a rock suggests the almost infinite elasticity of the psyche. But it may not be quite so easy to swallow human otherness. Indeed, our model of the unresponsive person is that of someone so bounded or self-absorbed that there is no room for other people, let alone for rocks. Wordsworth’s early “Lines Left upon a seat in a Yew-tree” explores just such a self-imprisoned state, fittingly memorialized by a pile of stones (“Who he was / That piled these stones . . . I well remember”; ll. 8–12). Romanticism has as much to say about 164  |  chapter eight

pride, egotism, contempt, and disappointment as it does about wise passiveness and receptivity to nature; Wordsworth’s Solitary in The Excursion is a sympathetic critique of just such a victim of historical and personal alienation.41 An unexpected example—here, however, an instance of collective insensibility—can be found in the fourth poem of Wordsworth’s “Poems on the Naming of Places”: “POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears” (l. 86).42 This companion piece to “Joanna’s Rock” reveals a nuanced critique of the too-lively imagination as a means to reject as well as connect with other people. “Point Rash-Judgment” refers to the disabling powers of misor preconception. The poem opens by describing the “natural causeway” made up of “rough stones and crags” that encircles the lake at Grasmere, like a girdle. As the poet strolls with “two beloved friends,” the meandering shoreline diverts the party with “Such objects as the waves had toss’d ashore, / Feather, or leaf, or weed, or wither’d bough” (ll. 13–14). Lake-wrack competes for notice with dandelion seeds and thistle’s beard skimming along the calm surface of the water, blown by an invisible breeze—“Its very playmate and its moving soul” (l. 27). The group, too, is playful, often pausing to notice a flower or a plant, its mood lightheartedly antiquarian; the tall fern “of the Queen Osmunda named” (i.e., Osmunda regalis, or queen fern) is lovelier than “Lady of the Mere / Sole-sitting by the shores of old Romance” (ll. 39–40). Old Romance (“feeding unthinking fancies”) mingles pleasantly with the bucolic sounds of distant reapers. It is punctured by an unexpected apparition when the haze suddenly unveils “on a Point of jutting land / The tall and upright figure of a Man” (ll. 49–50). A man—or a rock? He resembles one of those masses of rock described by Wordsworth’s Guide as lying “in some places like stranded ships” or jutting piers, providing an arresting focus for tourists’ attention.43 Judging from his clothes, the man is a peasant; but he alone is not at work during harvesttime: “with one and the same voice / We all cried out, that he must be indeed / An idle man” (ll. 55–57). Idleness—inability to work, as distinct from the idle fancies of the insouciant rambling trio—takes on a different aspect when the man turns his head at their approach: we saw a Man worn down By sickness, gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks And wasted limbs, his legs so long and lean senseless rocks  |  165

That for my single self I look’d at them, Forgetful of the body they sustain’d.— (ll. 64–68) The onlooker is abruptly separated and “selved” from the group by this apparition (“for my single self ”). Revealed as a man too sick to work, casting his line “to gain / A pittance from the dead unfeeling lake / That knew not of his wants” (ll. 70–72), the solitary angler reflects the onlookers’ unconscious alienation: it is the whimsical walkers who are revealed as unfeeling, not just the lake “That knew not of his wants.” Two kinds of idleness are defined here: “The happy idleness of that sweet morn, / With all its lovely images” (ll. 74–75) and the enforced idleness of sickness, “Too weak to labour in the harvest field” (l. 69). When the carefree ramblers’ fancies are “chang’d / To serious musing and selfreproach,” the poem’s moral is didactically reframed as the need to reserve judgment “And temper all our thoughts with charity” (ll. 75–76, 79). But the understory is the unexpected externalization of interior dissociation, displaced from onlookers to sick man and from sick man to lake—the disconnect of the carefree group disporting itself “on the shores of old romances” within earshot of the sound of other people at work while deploring the idleness of the out-of-work angler. The delightful “girdle” around the lake be­comes suddenly hostile and unknown, like a “newdiscover’d coast,” while its “memorial name, uncouth indeed” replaces the veil of romance. The name suggests a voyage into alien territory. Although worlds apart from the sudden apparition of the Discharged Soldier, the sunken cheeks and wasted features of the solitary angler ask what it means (by contrast) to be fully human. This is not simply a matter of the impulse to charity toward those less fortunate than oneself but the capacity to register the strangeness of the human when it unexpectedly takes on the aspect of a thing. “Point Rash-Judgment” suggests that having too much imagination can amount in the end to having too little. The spot marks a failure of seeing whose belated recognition reveals that—as distinct from group fantasies about ferns and thistle-balls—the human element in landscape can be destructively misread. The bucolic scene with its “busy mirth / Of Reapers, Men and Women, Boys and Girls” (ll. 42–43), excludes the dark underside of pastoral. The sign of this neglect is Wordsworth’s gaunt caricature of a biped with legs “so long and lean” that they seem to take over his entire body. The incomplete angler becomes a gauge of the idle walkers’ myopia.44 166  |  chapter eight

Discomfort and discord surface amid the bucolic landscape. It is not so much that appearances are deceptive as that the imagination is confined by its own projections—hence its proneness to rash judgment. Making sense of the marginal, one might say, always risks misreading it. Here, however, it is the marginal that becomes the mark of the human in its most estranged and estranging form.

Rock Art When Wordsworth chisels his inscription on Joanna’s rock, “like a Runic priest, in characters / Of formidable size” (“To Joanna,” ll. 28–29), he alludes to the widespread belief that the Druids were responsible for the petroglyphs and petroforms in the Lake District landscape, whose ancient megaliths and stone circles—dating from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age—had been identified since the seventeenth century with Druidic temples and rites.45 These monuments, along with the ruins of medieval castles, abbeys, and monasteries, attracted Francis Grose’s antiquarian attention (fig. 8.4).46 Wordsworth’s Guide and unpublished Tour refer to the stone circles at Shap, the stone circle known as Long Meg and Her Daughters, and the so-called Sunken Church as “Druid Temples.”47 A late sonnet first included as a footnote to the 1822 edition of Wordsworth’s Guide, on “The Monument commonly called Long Meg and her Daughters” near Penrith (“A weight of awe not easy to be borne . . .”), apostrophizes the fifteen-foot-high Bronze Age megalith known as Long Meg as “Her, whose strength and stature seem to scorn / The power of years . . . Giant-Mother!” (ll. 5–6, 8).48 If she could speak, Wordsworth’s sonnet imagines, Long Meg would tell “When, how, and wherefore, rose on British ground / That wondrous Monument” (ll. 11–12). Wordsworth’s awed note on this legend-surrounded monument near Penrith (the largest and most spectacular stone circle in the North of England) relates how “he has not seen any other Relique of those dark ages, which can pretend to equal it in singularity and appearance.”49 Wordsworth’s “American Tradition,” the title of one of the 1820 River Duddon sonnets, alludes to “the sculptured shows / Conspicuous yet where Oroonoko flows” (sonnet 16, ll. 2–3). His source is Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, which recounts his travels to South America in 1788–1804 and had been recently translated by Helena Maria Williams.50 Smiling “at the White Man’s ignorance,” Native Americans tell the European traveler about the Great Waters—“how they rose, / Covered the plains, and . . . / Mounted through every intricate defile” (ll. 6–8)—in order to explain the creation senseless rocks  |  167

figure 8.4. Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 8 vols. (London: Hooper and Wigstead, 1783), vol. 1, facing 135. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library.

of otherwise inaccessible rock sculptures high above the plain.51 The flood allowed their ancestors access to the unapproachable cliff faces, where they Carved, on mural cliff ’s undreaded side, Sun, moon, and stars, and beast of chase or prey; Whate’er they sought, shunn’d, loved, or deified! (Sonnet 16, ll. 12–14) Like the stone circles of ancient Britain, these carvings once had a function—whether as astronomical calendars, as mnemonic devices for storytelling, or for hunting or ritual purposes. Wordsworth’s “runic” characters placed him in an ancient tradition of rock artists and rock art whose function and meaning had long been lost.52 The preceding sonnet (“From this deep chasm . . .”) speculates about the origins of a peculiar geographical formation in the Duddon Valley—a concave niche that seems freshly made, as if, with dire array, Some Statue, placed amid these regions old For tutelary service, thence had rolled, Startling the flight of timid Yesterday! Was it by mortals sculptur’d? (sonnet 15, ll. 5–9)53 Wordsworth’s question prompts a geological speculation: if not sculpted by human hand, was it “abruptly cast / Into rude shape by fire” (the plutonic theory of geological formation)? Or was it “fashioned by the turbulence of waves” (the biblical deluge)? Avoiding the issue, Wordsworth has it both ways. These are, he suggests, “fruitless questions” (sonnet 15, ll. 10–11, 13; sonnet 16, l. 1). Neatly evading the incompatibilities of early nineteenth-century geology and religion, he simultaneously holds plutonic and diluvial theories in suspense. In this slide from geology to rock artistry, and from volcanic origins to Noachic flood, Wordsworth seems to side with the American Indians’ preference for mythic origins. His primary concern, after all, is the origin of poetry. In his commentary on the Duddon Sonnets, Wordsworth quotes Green’s Guide to the Lakes on the river Duddon: “its course is soon again ruffled, and the current thrown into every variety of form which the rocky channel of a river can give to water.”54 The sonnet form shapes poetry in the same way; Wordsworth’s “Post-script” notes “the restriction which the frame senseless rocks  |  169

of the Sonnet imposed upon [him], narrowing unavoidably the range of thought.”55 He adds: “The power of waters over the minds of Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest ages.”56 Like the watercourses of the Lake District, his sonnet series has been “the growth of many years,” much as rock is carved by water over time.57 The idea of natural rock art as an unfinished process haunts Wordsworth’s accounts of the rock-strewn Lake District landscape. Here, for instance, describing the traveler’s route along the Duddon Valley, he mentions the pass through which the river flows between “the perpendicular rock on the right [that] bears the name of The Pen [and] the one opposite . . . called Wolla-barrow Crag, a name that occurs in several places to designate rocks of the same character.” He continues: “The chaotic aspect of the scene is well marked by the expression of a stranger, who strolled out while dinner was preparing, and, at his return, being asked by his host, ‘What way he had been wandering?’ replied, ‘As far as it is finished!’ ”58 Known for its perilous rockfalls, this unstable landscape is not so much changeless as continually being worked upon—in Wordsworth’s later poems, by an explicitly divine Architect who continues to shape his creation.59 Another of the Duddon sonnets alludes to the remains of Roman camps and the stone circles and monuments of “Druidic” prehistory, including “that mystic Round of Druid frame, / Tardily sinking by its proper weight,” known as “the Sunken Church” (sonnet 17, ll. 10, 12–13).60 This was the monument near Brougham Castle, which Wordsworth records visiting as a boy in the 1850 Prelude.61 In Thomas West’s 1778 Guide to the Lakes, he would have found an elaborate description of the “rude pillar” that formed its obelisk-like central feature: “It is entirely formed of loose stones and pebbles, collected from the adjacent rivers and fields; that the height has once been great, may be collected from the vast breadth of the base, increased by the fall of stones from the top; it encloses a circular area of 80 yards or more, and near the middle stands a red stone, upwards of three yards high.”62 West—who calls it “a stupendous construction . . . designed for some extraordinary use”—speculates that the pillar was “a place of study and contemplation” or perhaps was “destined for the colloquial instruction of pupils in mysteries of religion, and the arcana of civil government.”63 Singled out from the landscape as man-made, the ancient site is characterized by its combination of slow decay and accretions over time; it is a record of natural entropy as well as human intention. Whether it indicates the rise and fall of ancient waters or the cumulative fall of stones, rock art marks the lapse of 170  |  chapter eight

time as well as the mysteries of prehistory. It becomes a measure of duration as well as induration. Wordsworth’s “Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone” (1817) contains his clearest speculations on the geological origins of the Lake District landscape—“left as if by earthquake strewn, / Or from the Flood escaped” (ll. 11–12).64 Yet the absence of human marks on the landscape (“No appanage of human kind; / Nor hint of man”) does not preclude ideas of “handy-work . . . By something cognizably shaped” (ll. 6–7, 8–9). Whether Druid altar or “Egyptian monument,” the rock-strewn pass threatens to erase the human environment (“Lawns, houses, chattels, groves and fields, / All that the fertile valley shields”; ll. 27–28). The poet turns in relief from the mists and winds of the pass to the valley below: “Farewell, thou desolate Domain!” (l. 77).65 In one of his continuations to the “Ode,” Wordsworth—still opposing metaphorical heights to humanized valley—introduces a cave lower down that belongs to a different mythology: “the Egerian Grot.”66 Here, “deciphering as we may / Diluvian records” or else “the sighs of Earth / Interpreting” (“To the Same,” ll. 33–35), the “Ode” sets itself the formidable task of measuring the passage of time, moment by moment: counting for old Time His minutes, by reiterated drops, Audible tears, from some invisible source That deepens upon fancy—more and more Drawn tow’rd the centre whence those sighs creep forth To awe the lightness of humanity. (ll. 35–40)67 For the Wordsworth of 1817 (no pagan), the teardrops of humanized nature become the measure of time’s ancient exhalations in the face of human levity. In musical terminology, the idea of duration is synonymous not just with musical time but with music itself. The ancientness of the earth and the still, sad music of humanity come together in the word “duration,” which means not only “lasting” but “hardening”: Latin durare (to endure, to last) and indurare (to harden), from durus (hard). The word “during”—from the AngloFrench dure—has the same etymological origin; it may even go back to the Sanskrit word daru (wood, tree). Ideas of nonhuman time and endurance imply the longue durée of “earth’s diurnal course.” Rolled round “With rocks senseless rocks  |  171

and stones and trees” (“A Slumber did my spirit seal,” ll. 17–18), Lucy becomes a part of the gravity-driven motion of planet Earth. The reiterated drops or audible tears of Wordsworth’s “old Time” grieve for the dehumanizing effects of deep time. Whereas in the past standing stones enabled Druids to measure the seasons, and Long Meg and her daughters danced the Sabbath away, now their stasis and decay have become yet another measure of the slow, inexorable, weighty passage of time. Wordsworth’s “Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone” reminds us that poetry too is a form of timekeeping—musical in its metrical recurrence as well as in its sighs and elegiac songs. The senseless rocks of The Ruined Cottage are called upon to witness the grief of time past: poetry’s audible tears make them eloquent at last. The Lake District landscape abounds in anthropomorphic names: for example, the Old Woman of Helm Crag and the Stone Man on Scawfell Head, mentioned in Wordsworth’s Guide.68 According to Adam Sedgwick’s midnineteenth-century glossary of Lake District terms, the word “man” designates an eminence on a hill; maen “is an old word for stone . . . and the ‘man’ of the mountains is always of stone”—as if thing and name are tautological.69 The stony endurance of the stone man (at once more and less than human) becomes a figure for duration—according Wordsworth, a crucial ingredient of sublimity. But, he observes, these markers affect us as sublime only when their individuality “is lost in the general sense of duration belonging to the earth itself.”70 It is not enough for a rock to stand out: “Prominent individual form must, therefore, be conjoined with duration.” Paradoxically, a mountain produces sublime effects because, “although a stationary object,” it conveys “the sense of motion which in the mind accompanies the lines by which the mountain itself is shaped out”—lines that may be abrupt and precipitous or flowing and continuous.71 Contemporary accounts of Lake District scenery often singled out distinctively shaped rocks as tourist destinations or as viewing points. William Gilpin offers just such a foreground view of a massive rock stranded on the shore in his Observations . . . Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772 (fig. 8.5). Later, William Green’s “new guide” to the Lakes quotes Gilpin (who had called it “the Bootherstone”) in illustrating the eponymous “Bowder Stone” (fig. 8.6): “Massy rocks of immense size, rent from the mountains, are every where found: but this stone appears to be of a different kind. It does not seem to have been the appendage of a mountain; but itself an independent creation.”72 Lying “like a ship upon its keel,” neither rent from the mountains nor washed up 172  |  chapter eight

figure 8.5. William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808), vol. 1, facing 131. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

by a flood, the boulder seems self-created, as if endowed with independent agency, a Leech Gatherer in the making. Wordsworth’s senseless rocks signify both endurance and “old” time; they belong to the past yet stubbornly withhold knowledge about the origins of the earth or the builders of prehistoric monuments. They may sing or speak, move or murmur, yet Wordsworth finds them consistently hard to read, like a hiatus in the text or a solitary figure glimpsed by the margin of a lake. Sedgwick writes that among the records of creation discovered to us by the monuments of the earth’s crust, we find no chapter more difficult than that which links the past with the present, and leads us up to the historic period, and the beginning of the works of men. Among the older records, we find chapter after chapter, of which we can read the characters and make out their meaning; and as we approach the period of man’s creation, our book becomes more clear, and nature seems to speak to us in language so like our own, that we easily comprehend it.73 senseless rocks  |  173

figure 8.6. William Green, The tourist’s new guide, containing a description of the lakes, mountains, and scenery, in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, with some account of their bordering towns and villages (Kendal: R. Lough, 1819), facing 132. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

But, he continues, when we get closer to the present, “a leaf has been torn from nature’s record.” The prehistoric record becomes as unreadable as the monuments of nature. Rocks—half-human, yet continuing motionless—become a type of the resistance to being read that Wordsworth elsewhere identifies with the chaos of Kirkstone Pass. Apropos of the sublime, he invokes the passive resistance of “the Rock in the middle of the fall of the Rhine at Chafhausen, as opposed for countless ages to that mighty mass of Waters.”74 The timeless opposition of rock to water becomes a sign of what Paul Fry calls “the pervasiveness of the nonhuman even in the human that precludes any and all imputation of anthropomorphic significance to the object-world.”75 Only in the mind’s eye (if then) does the object-world make any sense. Rocks both bear and oppose the current of poetic composition and the weight of passion; by refusing the very anthropomorphism they elicit, they set down markers for the limits of the human. The obduracy that confronts poet and reader in such things is analogous to poetry’s own resistance to being made sense of, located as it 174  |  chapter eight

is on what Nancy calls the “edgy meaning of extremity”—that elusive margin where meaning comes and goes, and poetry and rocks are hard to prize apart. In Alice Oswald’s “Autobiography of a Stone,” the silent, excluded, yet speaking “Stone-in-hiding” both hears and does not hear itself shouted for. The poet’s apostrophic “oh” contains its obdurate nonreply. Whatever the gift they hold, rocks keep it to themselves: if the wind were a voice I could contend with . . . but I am moving only very slowly, lasting out of earth and keeping my gift under darkness.76

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notes introduction 1. Composed at Muzot, 5 October 1924. The translation here is by Leishman; see Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems, 1906–1926, trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 329. 2. See Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth and Metapsychology,” in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory, ed. Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 200. Hartman’s “metapsychological” reading considers poetry’s ubiquitous animation of nature in relation to Freud’s thoughts on the death instinct, aiming at “a fuller understanding of the psyche’s relation to matter by linking poetry and material reverie” (207). See also the quietist discussion of lyric inconsequence and nature’s purposiveness in “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 168–70: “as in Wordsworth’s other meditative lyrics, we find no break . . . between having a thought and quieting it” (170). 3. See Wordsworth’s 1800 note on “The Thorn,” in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797– 1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 351. For Wordsworth’s “things” and repetition, see also Alexander Regier, “Words Worth Repeating: Language and Repetition in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory,” in Regier and Uhlig, eds., Words­ worth’s Poetic Theory, 61–80. 4. “The Thing” (1950), in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 2001), 163–80. 5. For an original account of the ephemeral matter (“lyric substance”) of poetry, see Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 6. William Wordsworth, “These chairs they have no words to utter,” ll. 29–30, in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 580. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?” [What (thing) is poetry?], in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 221–37. Derrida compares the poem to a hedgehog that rolls itself up when threatened. 8. “All translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages.” See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 257. 9. For “thing theory,” see the special issue “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001), especially Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 1–22. Brown writes: “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subjectobject relation . . . things is a word that tends . . . to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable” (4). On thinking through things, see also the sprightly essay by Steven Connor, “Thinking Things,” Textual Practice 24, no. 1 (February 2010): 1–20.

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10. See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For Wordsworth’s thinking in and through metrical poetry, see also Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Finite Thinking,” in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3–30. 12. I have in mind such critics as Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Timothy Bahti, The Ends of the Lyric: Directions and Consequences in Western Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and, more recently, Sarah Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 13. See, e.g., W. J. T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” 167–84, and John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” 270–85; both in Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001). Frow draws on Bruno Latour for the mediation of technology and “actor theory”: “if we think of an actor or actant in [Latour’s] sense as an entity with the power to associate chains of matter, text, humans and nonhumans, and money, then the reservation of the term to embodied human will becomes absurd: things too embody human will” (280). 14. As Barbara Johnson argues elegantly and pithily in the essays collected in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 15. For the meaningfulness of objects, see Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004). For anthropology’s shift from symbolic meanings created by social exchange to meanings generated by things, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 16. See “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud,” in Carson McCullers, Collected Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 125–33.

chapter 1 1. Thomas Forster, Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena, 2d ed. (London: Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy, 1815), 31. 2. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Towards a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 137, 138. 3. See Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (London: Picador, 2001), for an accessible and informative account of Luke Howard’s legacy to meteorology and his impact on his contemporaries; see also Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006), for an instructive anecdotal study for the cloud addict; while John A. Day, The Book of Clouds (New York: Sterling, 2006), testifies to the enduring popular-science appeal of clouds, as does www.cloudappreciationsociety.org. 4. Luke Howard, Essay on the Modification of Clouds (London: J. Taylor, 1804); see Hamblyn, Invention of Clouds, 215–16.

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5. See C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1951), 288, 273; quoted in Hugh Haughton, “Progress and Rhyme: ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’ and Romantic Poetry,” in John Clare in Context, ed. Geoffrey Summerfield, Hugh Haughton, and Adam Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 73. 6. I am deeply indebted to the meteorological study of Constable by John E. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1999). See also the catalog for a National Galleries of Scotland exhibition on Constable: Edward Morris, ed., Constable’s Clouds (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2000), which contains an essay by Thornes as well as exploring the aesthetic aspects of Constable’s cloud studies. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change,” Wordsworth Circle 38, nos. 1–2 (2007): 25–34, contains an interesting discussion of Constable’s The Hay Wain in relation to his cloud studies and the historical reality of climate change. 7. See Kurt Badt, John Constable’s Clouds, trans. Stanley Godman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 10, 13; and Hamblyn, Invention of Clouds, 205–12. 8. Cf. Susan Stewart, “What Thought Is Like,” in The Open Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 99–109; writing of “nature’s mutability” (clouds, waves, stars), she concludes: “Through works of art about the sea and sky, we search in our vision of forces of nature for some record of the force of our own thought” (109). 9. For the uses of l’informe, see Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 10. See the discussion below of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 11. See Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 76; and Forster, Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena, 31. 12. See Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, 14–15. 13. Ibid., 4–7, 11. 14. Ibid., 11, 29. 15. See John Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 6, The Fishers, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1968), 76–78; and Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 280. 16. See Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 142–46. 17. See Margaret Grainger, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 337. 18. Clare’s confinement in two relatively humane mental asylums totaled twenty-seven years, until his death at seventy in 1864 in the Northamptonshire General Lunatic Asylum. He was a voluntary patient in Dr. Allen’s asylum, High Beeches at Epping, from 1837 until his flight in 1841. Reviewing his treatment, Porter argues persuasively that Clare’s confinement was a contributory factor to his “madness” and pointedly declines to offer any more definitive diagnosis than the elastic term “manic-depressive” combined with chronic economic difficulties; see Roy Porter, “ ‘All Madness for Writing’: John Clare and the Asylum,” in Summerfield, Haughton, and Phillips, John Clare in Context, 269–70. 19. The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837–1864, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 2:396.

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20. See Jonathan Bate, John Clare, a Biography (London: Picador, 2003), 412–13. 21. For the rise of meteorology, see Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 22. See John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 23. See John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 109, 189–21. 24. See Summerfield, Haughton, and Phillips, John Clare in Context, 4–5. 25. See Grainger, Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, 94n, 147n. 26. See Porter, “ ‘All Madness for Writing,’ ” 259–60. 27. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 145–46. 28. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 103. 29. See John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 153–61; and Bate, John Clare, a Biography, 451–56. 30. Grainger, Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, 336. 31. John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–98), 3:505–8. 32. Adam Phillips, “The Exposure of John Clare,” in Summerfield, Haughton, and Phillips, John Clare in Context, 180. 33. John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period, 3:575–76. 34. Porter, “ ‘All Madness for Writing,’ ” 259. 35. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 33, 103, 184. 36. Ibid., 103 (pl. 21). 37. See the vivid and dismaying account in Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex” (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005). 38. John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:142. 39. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–8), 5:133. 40. Ibid., 137. 41. Ibid., 139. 42. Ibid., 140–41. 43. Ibid., 144. 44. Ibid., 146, 147. 45. Ibid., 147n. 46. Ibid., 148. 47. Ibid., 150n. 48. Ibid., 156. 49. See Ray Lambert, John Constable and the Theory of Landscape Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 119. 50. Ibid., 96, 76.

180  |  notes to pages 15–22

51. John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:77. 52. See Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 68–80; and Morris, Constable’s Clouds, 123. 53. John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:142. 54. See Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 117. 55. John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:76–77; see also Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 278–80. 56. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 39, 76. 57. Ibid., 117; and Badt, John Constable’s Clouds, 51. 58. Forster, Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena, vi–viii. 59. John Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 4, Patrons, Dealers, and Fellow Artists, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1966), 146. 60. See Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 230 (pl. 100). 61. Ibid., 235 (pl. 103). 62. Ibid., 238 (pl. 105). 63. “For John Clare,” in Ashbery, Selected Poems, 103. 64. See Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, 241. 65. John Constable’s Discourses, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 69. 66. Ibid., 64. The lines are from Crabbe’s “The Lover’s Journey,” ll. 1–2. 67. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (London: Routledge, 2004), 54. Merleau-Ponty is citing Jean Paulhan on modern painting. 68. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 5, 7. 69. Ibid., 248. 70. Ibid., 27, 29. 71. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 53–4. 72. Ibid., 54. 73. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 181. 74. Ibid., 29. 75. See ibid., 32. 76. Ibid., 49. 77. Ibid., 132. 78. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 55. 79. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 133. 80. Ibid., 139. 81. Ibid., 142. 82. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 73. 83. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 143; Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 52–53. 84. As Martin Jay has argued in his comprehensive study Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 85. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 95.

notes to pages 22–35  |  181

chapter 2 1. W. G. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp,” in W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: New Directions, 2004), 93. 2. Walter Benjamin, “N, On the Theory of Knowledge,” in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 476. 3. Ibid. My thinking about the question of history and citation is especially indebted to a timely rereading of Ian Balfour’s essay “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History),” Modern Language Notes 106, no. 3 (April 1991): 622–47. 4. “If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of it what a recent author has said of literary texts—namely that the past has left in them images comparable to those registered by a light-sensitive plate. . . . ‘Read what was never written,’ runs a line in Hofmannsthal. The reader one should think of here is the true historian.” See Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 405. 5. Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 68. 6. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1998), 179. 7. In one of his more recent poems, Hamburger—anticipating orchard windfalls—refers to “thirty-five unmarketable kinds: / Once seen and savoured, what they were they are / And the sound stock will hold.” See “October,” in From a Diary of Non-events (London: Anvil Press, 2002), 51. 8. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 181, 182. 9. Ibid., 182. Cf. Hölderlin, as translated by Hamburger: “And when I heard / That of the near islands one / Was Patmos, / I greatly desired / There to be lodged, and there / To approach the dark grotto.” See Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, 4th ed. (London: Anvil Press, 2004), 553. Hölderlin lived in Homburg before being taken to a mental clinic. 10. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 184–85. 11. Heaney, District and Circle, 16. Compare Edward Snow’s translation, where the son of the house tells his tale “with the look of someone lying” (“And he was different: as from a far-off land”). See “The Site of the Fire,” in Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001), 229. 12. “Heimath” (“Home”), in Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, 607. 13. Michael Hamburger, Intersections: Shorter Poems, 1994–2000 (London: Anvil Press, 2000), 56. 14. See Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 184. 15. Michael Hamburger, String of Beginnings: Intermittent Memoirs, 1924–1954 (London: Skoob Books, 1991), 329 (originally published in 1973; with added postscript, 1991). 16. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 177. 17. Ibid., 177, 177–78.

182  |  notes to pages 36–45

18. Ibid., 178. 19. Hamburger, String of Beginnings, 184. 20. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 178. 21. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, 4:392. 22. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 178. 23. Michael Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” in Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted, 8. For a related inquiry into the role of the photographic image in Sebald’s writing, see also Carol Jacobs, “What Does It Mean to Count? W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,” in her Skirting the Ethical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 131–50. 24. Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” 8–9. 25. See Andrea Kohler, “Penetrating the Dark,” in Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted, 101: “So this dialogue between text and etching also becomes an exchange of looks between poets and painters, between the living and the dead. It follows the rhythm of a blink.” 26. Hamburger, String of Beginnings, 320. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 328. 29. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese,” 91, 93. 30. Ibid., 93. 31. Ibid., 95. 32. Hamburger, String of Beginnings, 26–27. 33. W. G. Sebald, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 42. 34. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 182–83. 35. “Fiction is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient” (Sebald, Emergence of Memory, 41). 36. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 190. 37. Hamburger, String of Beginnings, 323. 38. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese,” 87. 39. Compare Walter Benjamin on the urge to search old photographs “to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently.” See his “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 510. 40. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 121. 41. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 188, 187. 42. Hofmannsthal, Lord Chandos Letter, 125, 124. See also Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 109–10n16, for a brief discussion of Sebald’s allusions to the Lord Chandos letter in The Rings of Saturn and Sebald’s Austerlitz. 43. Hofmannsthal, Lord Chandos Letter, 127–28. For the muteness of things in Sebald’s writing, see also Marina Warner’s illuminating discussion in her 2007 Sebald lecture, “The Lost Life of Things,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 July 2008.

notes to pages 46–51  |  183

44. Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” 9. Compare Benjamin’s comment on Atget’s photographs: “He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift.” See Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518. 45. Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” 11. 46. W. G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 2002), 26–27. 47. Ibid., 27, 28. 48. Ibid., 12, 13. 49. Sebald, Emergence of Memory, 47. 50. See ibid., 48, 84. “I grew up in postwar Germany where there was . . . something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e., your parents never told you any thing about their experiences because there was at the very least a great deal of shame attached to these experiences” (ibid., 84–85). 51. Ibid., 85, 106. As Andrea Kohler argues, “the dimming of vision and the penetration of darkness” become key metaphors in Sebald’s writing for “the work of remembrance, the work of witness, in the torrential flux of time” (“Penetrating the Dark,” 97). Alluding to the narrator’s loss of vision in Austerlitz, Kohler also underlines the importance of the peripheral for Sebald—“flashes of thought and remembrance, moments of illumination on the verges of perception” (99). 52. Sebald, After Nature, [79]: “Yet this night you might have rested here with me on the green leafage. We have ripe apples, mealy chestnuts, and a wealth of pressed cheeses. Even now the housetops yonder are smoking and longer shadows fall from the mountain heights” (Virgil, Eclogue 1, ll. 79–83). See Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 31. 53. Sebald, After Nature, 83–84; cf. Sebald’s account in Emergence of Memory, 99. 54. Sebald, After Nature, 84–85. 55. Ibid., 87. 56. Ibid., 111. 57. Ibid., 112. 58. W. G. Sebald, On The Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2003), 67. 59. Ibid., vii, 68. Sebald quotes the famous passage from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations (Bell uses Harry Zohn’s 1970 translation). The Zurich lectures were delivered in autumn 1997; After Nature was published the following year. 60. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, viii, ix. 61. Ibid., 19, 20. 62. Ibid., 39, 40. Lord Zuckerman intended “On the Natural History of Destruction” to be the title of his own unwritten account of the overgrown ruins he saw in postwar Germany; but by 1980, “he could no longer remember in detail what he had wanted to say at the time” (ibid., 32). 63. Ibid., 40n, 40–41. Sebald ends his Zurich lectures with a similarly ironic reminder that when the victorious German armies reached the Volga in August 1942, and refugee-filled Stalingrad was under assault by German bombers, “not a few were dreaming of settling down after the war on an estate in the cherry orchards beside the quiet Don” (ibid., 105).

184  |  notes to pages 51–56

64. According to Richter: “I’m not really very interested in history painting, and I don’t know much about it. The starting points for my October [1988 Baader-Meinhof] paintings were photographs.” See Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 227. 65. The subject of Richter’s most famous historical paintings, the deaths of the BaaderMeinhof group, “stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since” (ibid., 173). His comments associate the series with repetition: “They are the almost forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief and horror (as if the pictorial repetition of the events were a way of understanding those events, being able to live with them)” (ibid., 174). 66. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” in B. H. D. Buchloh, J. E. Chevier, A. Zweite, and R. Rochlitz, Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter (Barcelona: Llibres de Recerca, MACBA, 2000), 16. 67. See ibid., 12, 15. In this model, for Buchloh, historical narrative “is displaced by a focus on the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks and an infinity of participating agents, while the process of history is reconceived as a structural system of perpetually changing interactions and permutations” (ibid., 18). 68. Ibid., 23. 69. Ibid., 28. 70. For Richter’s oft-cited 1966 remark, see Jean-François Chevrier, “Between the Fine Arts and the Media (The German Example: Gerhard Richter),” in Buchloh et al., Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter, 36, 51–52n13; see also “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh” (1986), in Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 153. 71. Richter, “Notes, 1986,” in Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 150. 72. Ibid., 143. 73. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” 28. 74. “Richter perceives nature as a collection of images or tableaux which signify the ineluctable loss of the ‘hearth,’ the ‘lack of homeland’ (Heimatlosigkeit)” (Chevrier, “Between the Fine Arts and the Media,” 41). For the emergence of Richter’s interest in landscape, see ibid., 56n24. 75. Ibid., 57n28 (from a 1985 interview with Dorothea Dietrich). 76. Sebald, Emergence of Memory, 82. 77. Richter, “Notes, 1989,” in Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 177. 78. Richter, “Notes, 1986,” 124. 79. Oskar Bätchsmann, “Landscapes at One Remove,” in Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1998), 24–38. 80. Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 36. 81. “Interview with Rolf Schön” (1972), in ibid., 74. 82. Richter, “Letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann” (February 1973), in ibid., 81. 83. Benjamin, “N, On the Theory of Knowledge,” 462. 84. “Historical knowledge is possible only within the historical moment. But knowledge within the historical moment is always knowledge of a moment.” See Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” 4:403.

notes to pages 56–60  |  185

chapter 3 1. Quotations from “Nutting” are taken from the reading text of William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 218–20; for related drafts, see ibid., 302–7, 545–55. The episode was originally intended to form part of what became The Prelude: “These verses arose out of the remembrance of feelings I had often had when a boy” (ibid., 391). 2. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 292. 3. Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Palo Alto, CA: Tioga, 1988), 17. Stone’s classic and much reprinted essay was first published in Southern California Law Review 45 (1972). 4. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 91, 80 5. For this term, see Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 75. Hartman’s Mutilated Bower contains “the larger story of how [the sympathetic] imagination moves precariously closer to nature and perhaps extinction.” Hartman adds: “By this violation of the bower (a familiar theme of Romance), the child is joined to rather than separated from nature. His feelings begin to be humanized, and the marriage of imagination and nature . . . is anticipated” (75). 6. “In ‘Nutting,’ a youngster sallies forth, ritually decked for his exploit with nutting-crook, wallet, and old clothes. He comes to a beautiful nook (a ‘virgin scene,’ says the poet, still using a Latin elegance), and there the hazels rise temptingly with their clusters. After a moment of sensuous restraint . . . the boy ravages the sheltered trees, though not unconscious of pain when he beholds the mutilated bower. The action here is purely psychological” (ibid., 73–74). See also Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counterspirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 70–76, for a discussion of “Nutting” as the violation of nature by imagination; Ferguson reads Wordsworth’s admonition to the “dearest Maiden” as “the poet’s warning to his own muse” (76). 7. See Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” (1933), in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-analysis, ed. Michael Balint, trans. Eric Mosbacher et al. (repr., London: Karnac Books, 1994), 156–67. 8. For the “impassioned nutter,” see Wordsworth’s Isobel Fenwick note, where “lover” is replaced by “nutter”: “Like most of my schoolfellows I was an impassioned [?lover del] nutter.” See Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 391. Ferguson calls him “an artful character stepping from the pages of romance narrative” (Wordsworth: Language as Counterspirit, 73); the artful romance narrative suggests amorous quest. 9. Alice Oswald, Woods etc. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). 10. Commenting on a passage from The Visible and the Invisible, Derrida sees as unconvincing both Merleau-Ponty’s “precautions . . . to withdraw his project from some anthropology” and his protests “against an anthropological interpretation of his design” (Derrida, On Touching, 210, 211). 11. Derrida alludes to not having read Nancy’s essay when he first wrote the essay that forms the core of his own book (see ibid., 194).

186  |  notes to pages 61–64

12. See Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 196–97. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 59. 14. Ibid., 61. 15. Ibid., 62. 16. “ . . . not stood, not sat, but ‘was’—the figure presented in the most naked simplicity possible”; see Wordsworth’s letter to Sara Hutchinson of 14 June 1802, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 2d ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 366. 17. Nancy, Sense of the World, 62–63. 18. Derrida, On Touching, 292. 19. See Freud’s note of 22 August 1938, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), 23:300. Derrida is referring to various citations in Nancy’s work (see On Touching, 11n) as well as invoking the Freud note that immediately follows: “Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.” 20. Derrida, On Touching, 15. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 16. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. See Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165. 27. Ibid., 170n. 28. Ibid., 171. 29. Ibid., 172n. 30. Ibid., 176n. 31. See “On Negation” (1925), in Complete Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 19:235–39: “Thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there” (237). 32. Nagel, Mortal Questions, 178n. 33. Ibid., 194. Nagel’s argument about panpsychism stalks the problem of how and why mental states, or consciousness, cannot be considered merely as physical properties of the organism. He also broaches a more unanswerable question about the origins of consciousness in organic, as well as animate, life: “how conscious life arises in the universe” (182). 34. “To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, / Even the loose stones that cover the high-way, / I gave a moral life, I saw them feel, / Or link’d them to some feeling” (Prel. 3.124–27).

notes to pages 64–70  |  187

35. See Dove Cottage MS 15; Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 303, 549. Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s—Salisbury Plain and the rambunctiously moral Peter Bell—shows an unexpected preoccupation with violent protagonists who strike children or animals. 36. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 77. 37. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 10. 38. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 354. 39. “The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another” (ibid., 355). See also J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 34. Unlike Nagel, but perhaps like Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello believes that “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another” (Lives of Animals, 35). For further discussion of the Coetzee/Costello problem, see Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Carey Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 40. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 363. 41. Ibid., 401. 42. Ibid., 404. 43. John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Respon­ sibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (London: Macmillan, 1991), 123. 44. Ibid., 129. 45. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), 258. See also Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991). 46. Bate, Song of the Earth, 280; Bate is discussing the poetry of Edward Thomas in the Heideggerian context of his closing chapter, which asks “What Are Poets For?” 47. See Jacques Derrida, “Che cos´è la poesia?,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 221–37. 48. See Bate, Song of the Earth, 283. Bate is alluding to Heidegger’s “Poetically Man Dwells” and his earlier discussion of Heidegger, poetry, and dwelling (261–73). 49. Kate Rigby, “Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis,” New Literary History 35, no. 3 (2004): 432. 50. Ibid., 433. 51. “As Bate boldly restates the Heideggerian case, ‘things need us so that they can be named’” (ibid.). See Bate, Song of the Earth, 265. 52. Rigby, “Earth, World, Text,” 437. This nonequation has an obvious resemblance to Derrida’s negative poetics—closer perhaps than Rigby is willing to acknowledge; his bristling poem is both differentiated from and hooked onto the tangible world. 53. See Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 102; for deep ecology, see also 137. 54. Bate, Song of the Earth, 37; see Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 107. 55. See Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 101. 56. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130–55. 57. Ibid., 133.

188  |  notes to pages 70–76

58. Ibid., 133–34. 59. Ibid., 148. 60. Derrida, On Touching, 75. 61. Ibid., 145, 144. The reference is to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1959 article “Bergson in the Making,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 183–85. 62. Derrida, On Touching, 198. 63. Ibid., 208; Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 145. 64. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 254. 65. Ibid. For a brief but penetrating discussion of this passage, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 295–96. HellerRoazen asks: “What would it mean for touch to be the root of thinking, and for thinking, in turn, to be in its most elevated form a kind of touch?” (285). I regret that the extensive discussion of sensation in The Inner Touch did not inform my own thinking at the time of writing. 66. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 254. 67. Oswald, Woods etc., 7. chapter 4 1. Prose Works, 2:96, ll. 583–87. Written for The Friend, only the first of the three Essays appeared in 1810; in 1814 the deaf Dalesman’s epitaph formed The Excursion, 7.395–481. 2. “Monologue of a Deaf Man,” in David Wright, Deafness (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), 3. Wright’s autobiographical account provides an exceptional insight into the auditory experience and 1930s education, as well as wartime Oxford years, of a postlingually deaf poet. Compare Wright’s admiration of Wordsworth’s lines on the pine tree “whose composing sound / Was wasted” on the deaf man’s ear with his assessment that otherwise, Wordsworth’s poem is “a portrait of a deaf man [that] carries no particular insights” (Deafness, 201n). 3. See Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” in his The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81, esp. 72. De Man’s singling out of prosopopoeia (“to compose by means of faces”) as the defining trope of autobiography has received extensive commentary; see, e.g., Lorna Clymer, “Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper, and Wordsworth,” English Literary History 62 (1995): 347–86, which briefly criticizes the reading of the deaf Dalesman in my “‘Dithyrambic Fervour’: The Lyric Voice of The Prelude,” in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159–83, esp. 173–74. 4. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 73. 5. Prose Works, 2:93, 118–19. Wordsworth notes that the epitaph he composed for the deaf Dalesman is founded on the original Mardale epitaph and on “enquiries concerning the Deceased made in the neighbourhood” (Prose Works, 2:94). 6. Wright, Deafness, 11–12. See also Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 2–13; Sacks was given Wright’s book by W. H. Auden. 7. William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis, A. L. Denny Ferris, and J. Heydt-Stevenson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 285.

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8. See Wright, Deafness, 73–75, for his recitation of poetry after lights-out at boarding school as a form of “concert” (“probably the best training I could have given myself in metric and the handling of vowels and consonants, in the relations of sense and sound, in the orchestration of a poem”). 9. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 80. 10. See William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 253–55. Richard Cronin notes the link with Holme, arguing that the collapse of the Lake District community forced Wordsworth to transfer his faith to the society of letters; see “Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807 and the War against Napoleon,” Review of English Studies 48, no. 189 (February 1997): 33–50. 11. For the cumulative impact of print culture on orality and for the development of the modern sense of private reading, see, e.g., Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1988), 117–22, 130–32. 12. Dorothy Miles, a Welsh-born deaf poet who also makes use of sign language in her poems, writes that her poems “are written from the words and music that still sing in my mind.” Robert Panara, who also lost his hearing as a child, asserts: “My ears are deaf, and yet I seem to hear / Sweet Nature’s music and the songs of Man”; see The Quiet Ear: Deafness in Literature, ed. Brian Grant (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), 51, 227. 13. Cf., however, Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58–77, for “the denial of writing” in Wordsworth’s compositional and poetic practice; and for a provocative reading of sound in the deaf Dalesman’s epitaph, see ibid., 73–76. The term “composing” (referring to typesetting) offers an alternative gloss on the pine tree’s “composing sound”; see Ong, Orality and Literacy, 121–22. 14. Prose Works, 2:59. 15. See Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness, and the Senses (London: Flamingo, 1999), esp. chs. 15–17, for an informative account of Enlightenment debates over deaf education, signs, and natural language up to and during the period of the French Revolution; I am indebted to Rée´s imaginative history of Enlightenment and postEnlightenment attitudes to deafness. See also Harlan Lane, ed., The Deaf Experience, trans. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Random House, 1984). 16. In Britain, deaf education was pioneered during the 1760s by Thomas Braidwood at the Edinburgh Academy for the Deaf and Dumb, visited by Dr. Johnson in 1773, the year of Thomas Holme´s death. In 1783 the academy moved to Hackney, and in 1792 another academy opened in Bermondsey; see Rée, I See a Voice, 137–40, 154, 196–97. Braidwood taught the deaf successively to read, write, and speak, using a method he refused to share. 17. Lane, Deaf Experience, 22–23. 18. Ibid., 23. For the association of the deaf with printing and print culture during the French Enlightenment period, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 33. 19. Lane, Deaf Experience, 26. 20. For de l´Épée´s gestural methods and their relation to signs, see Renate Fischer, “Abbé de l´Épée and the Living Dictionary,” in Deaf History Unveiled, ed. John Vickry Van Cleve

190  |  notes to pages 82–86

(Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 13–26. For philosophical claims about universal language, see Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 33; and Rée, I See a Voice, 166–76. In Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781), written during the 1750s, Rousseau had speculated that gestural language preceded speech. 21. The defeat of manualism by oralism at the end of the nineteenth century, when medical science reclassified deafness as an abnormality, forced both signing and deaf teachers out of the classroom. On the prohibition of signing in favor of oralism and for an impassioned defense of autonomous deaf sign language (as well as its regional and national variations), see Sacks, Seeing Voices, 21–36. For a vivid account of the Gallaudet College student strike that led to the appointment of the college’s first deaf president, in 1988, see ibid., 125–59. See also Rée, I See a Voice, chs. 20, 21. For the association of sign language with primitive man, see Douglas C. Baynton, “ ‘Savages and Deaf-Mutes’: Evolutionary Theory and the Campaign against Sign Language in the Nineteenth Century,” in Van Cleve, Deaf History Unveiled, 92–112. 22. Lane, Deaf Experience, 36. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. De l´Épée´s sentimental standing at the end of the eighteenth century can be gauged from the successful London production of Thomas Holcroft´s play Deaf and Dumb, or the Orphan Protected (1801). Holcroft’s play, a translation of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s equally successful Abbé de l´Épée (performed in Paris in 1799), was first performed in London at the Drury Lane Theatre in February 1801 with the future Mrs. Charles Kemble as the orphaned deafmute. Bouilly’s play was also translated by Kotzebue, then retranslated into English by Benjamin Thompson as Deaf and Dumb; or the Orphan (1805); see Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 74–75, 79–80, 281–82nn. 25. Lane, Deaf Experience, 84–85. 26. Ibid., 97, 98. 27. Ibid., 99. 28. Prose Works, 2:59. 29. Ibid. 30. “At this point it can be said of ‘the language of the senseless stone’ that it acquires a ‘voice,’ the speaking stone counterbalancing the seeing sun” (De Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” 74–75). For an interesting account of what we “see” in (de Man’s) reading, see Rei Terada, “Seeing Is Reading,” in Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 162–77. 31. Prose Works, 2:54. 32. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 75. 33. Prose Works, 2:54. 34. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 75. 35. To Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 2d ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 314–15. 36. Ibid., 290. 37. See Geoffrey Hartman, “Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 34. Hartman’s concern with the unstable generic form

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of the nature-inscription leads him to Lyrical Ballads, particularly “Michael.” For a significant discussion of “The Brothers” in relation to epitaph, see Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 42–53. 38. References to “The Brothers” are to the reading text in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 142–59. For the poem’s composition between December 1799 and April 1800, see ibid., 379–80. 39. To Catherine Clarkson, January 1815, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1812–1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 188, 191. 40. To S. T. Coleridge, 24 and 27 December 1799, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 277 and note: “I have begun the pastoral of Bowman: in my next letter I shall probably be able to send it to you.” By 1800, the literary tour of the English Lake District was well established. 41. Prose Works, 2:54. 42. Wordsworth notes: “Some of the country church-yards, as here described, do not contain a single tombstone, and most of them have a very small number” (Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 382). 43. Isabella Fenwick note (see ibid., 380). Coleridge’s notes of the walking tour record how Bowman “broke his neck . . . by falling off a Crag . . . —supposed to have layed down & slept— but walked in his sleep, & so came to this crag, & fell off— . . . his Pike staff stuck midway & stayed there till it rotted away” (ibid.). 44. The two books are the brothers’ schoolbooks “lying both on a dry stone” (l. 258); the two hours are the time it takes James’s companions to return to their meeting place (l. 368); “those two bells of ours, which there you see / Hanging in the open air” (ll. 309–10) would have sounded for Leonard’s safe return from the sea. 45. Prose Works, 2:59. 46. Introducing the record formed by change and accidents to the landscape itself may have been the awkward passage on which Wordsworth found himself stuck in late December; see Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 380; and for a draft of the relevant passage (ll. 136–43), see ibid., 568, 570–71. 47. Wordsworth footnotes: “This description of the Calenture is sketch’d from an imperfect recollection of an admirable one in prose, by Mr. Gilbert, author of the Hurricane” (ibid., 144). The reference is to William Gilbert’s The Hurricane; a Theosophical and Western Eclogue (1796). 48. Prose Works, 2:85. 49. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 79. 50. See Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 563: “we had at that time little to live upon and he went to sea high in hope and heart that he should soon be able to make his Sister independent and contribute to any wants which I might have” (to James Losh, 16 March 1805). 51. To Sir George Beaumont, 11 February 1805 (ibid., 541). 52. See Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 380.

192  |  notes to pages 88–92

53. To James Losh, 16 March 1805, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 565. 54. Prose Works, 2:64–65. 55. See Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 379. 56. See Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 565, ll. 71–73. 57. Prose Works, 2:93. 58. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:136, 138. See Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 274. chapter 5 1. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 239–41, provides a brief account of the wreck and its aftermath, including the months of Wordsworth family grieving that followed. See also Richard E. Matlak, Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, 1800–1808 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), for another reading of these entwined relationships. 2. To Richard Wordsworth, 11 February 1805; to Sir George Beaumont, 11 February 1805; both in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 2d ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 540, 541. 3. To James Losh, 16 March 1805, in ibid., 565. John’s letter of 12 September 1802 to Mary Hutchinson quotes the covenant in Wordsworth’s “Michael,” ll. 415–17, changing the pronoun: “but, whatever fate / Befall [me] I shall love thee to the last, / And bear thy memory with me to the grave.” See The Letters of John Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 116, 126. 4. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 563. For the role of exchange as it relates to both Wordsworth’s poetry and eighteenth-century accounts of political economy, see Simon Jarvis, “Wordsworth’s Gifts of Feeling,” Romanticism 4, no. 1 (1998): 90–103. Jarvis points to the sustained attempt to separate gifts from exchange, and interest from selfinterest, in economic and cultural theory. See also the discussion in Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 97–107. 5. For details of John’s career, see the introduction to Letters of John Wordsworth; in 1801 John succeeded an uncle as captain of the Earl of Abergavenny (a thirty-two-gun privateer). Cargoes shipped on the Bengal–China route included rice, woolens, cotton, tea, opium, and “Bangh” (marijuana). Besides their trading cargoes, captains transported passengers (as well as troops) on the Bengal leg of the so-called double voyage. When it sunk, the Earl of Abergavenny was carrying 402 people, including its crew, of whom only 155 were saved. 6. See Dorothy’s combined letter to Jane Marshall of 15 and 17 March 1805 (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 561–62). 7. For the main contemporary accounts, see E. L. McAdam Jr., “Wordsworth’s Shipwreck,” PMLA 77 (1962): 240–47. John Wordsworth was exonerated of any responsibility for the wreck at the official inquiry, and the East India Company was acquitted of negligence. 8. Wordsworth reported John’s view that “he had indeed a great fear of Pilots and I have often heard him say that no situation could be imagined more distressing than that of being at

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the mercy of these men” (letter to James Losh, 16 March 1805, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 563). 9. “It does [William] good to speak of John as he was, therefore he is now writing a poem upon him. I should not say a poem for it is a part of the Recluse” (Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 11 April 1805, in ibid., 576). 10. “At first I had a strong impulse to write a poem that should record my Brother’s virtues and be worthy of his memory. . . . I composed much, but it is all lost except a few lines, as it came from me in such a torrent that I was unable to remember it; I could not hold the pen myself, and the subject was such, that I could not employ Mrs Wordsworth or my Sister as my amanuensis” (letter to Sir George Beaumont, 1 May 1805, in ibid., 586). 11. On 5 July 1805, Wordsworth wrote to Sir George Beaumont: “I have composed lately two small poems in memory of my Brother, but they are too melancholy else I would willingly copy them” (ibid., 603). On 7 August 1805, Wordsworth copied “To the Daisy,” “written in remembrance of a beautiful Letter of my Brother John” (ibid., 613). 12. Composed between 20 May and 5 July 1805, and possibly shortly before 5 July 1805, when Wordsworth mentioned having composed “two small poems in memory of my Brother” (ibid., 603). The text is based on a manuscript in Mary Wordsworth’s fair copy, with pencil corrections by Wordsworth, in Dove Cottage MS 57; see William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 617–18; and for Dove Cottage MS 57, see Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, xxii. Quotations from “Distressful gift!” are from this text. 13. According to Curtis, “A . . . ‘collection,’ about which it is possible only to speculate, since the volume does not survive, is mentioned by Wordsworth in his poem ‘Distressful gift!’ . . . It was apparently left behind before the final voyage. . . . If this commonplace book contained more samples of [Wordsworth’s] poems, it seems likely that they were transcribed by John himself from copies sent him from Grasmere” (Poems, in Two Volumes, 6). 14. “Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad / Her spirit, must it [the mind] lodge in shrines so frail?” (Prel. 5.47–48). 15. See Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 147–48. 16. See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 341. See also Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 151–52: “The infinite conversation will be a dialogue without dialectic, a conversation without negation. . . . So we may imagine once more a discourse outside of discourse . . . where the interlocutors neither contest nor supplement one another but have entered into a relation that is structured as an eternal return.” Arguably, the same logic structures Derrida’s understanding of the gift. See also Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 137–39, where the concept of “impossibility” involved in the Derridean gift (i.e., irreducible to any ontology) is shown to replace that of extreme affirmation in Infinite Conversation. 17. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 340. 18. Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9.

194  |  notes to pages 95–97

19. First published in Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (1997); see Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); the text referred to here appears in Derrida’s Work of Mourning. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas also includes Derrida’s “A Word of Welcome,” a consideration of Levinas’s ethics of hospitality, in which Derrida discusses Levinas’s understanding of the à-Dieu (see Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 101–5). 20. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 200. Cf. Derrida’s remark in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” concerning the classical funeral oration: “In its classical form, the funeral oration had a good side, especially when it permitted one to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally [tutoyer]. This is of course a supplementary fiction, for it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to.” But, he continues, “The interactions of the living must be interrupted” (ibid., 51–52). 21. Ibid., 51–52. 22. Ibid., 200. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 203; see Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 9. 25. To Sir George Beaumont, 23 February 1805, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 547. 26. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 200. In a footnote to Given Time, Derrida refers to “Fors” (his introduction to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word), arguing for the blurring of the distinction between introjection and incorporation: “I pretend to keep the dead alive, intact safe (save) inside me, but it is only in order to refuse, in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called normal mourning.” See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 129n. 27. Prose Works, 2:50. Weever’s 1631 work is a source for Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs. For the antimonumentalizing tradition to which Essays upon Epitaphs belongs, see Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poet’s Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159–63. 28. Prose Works, 2:52. 29. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 52. The classic statement is Joan Riviere’s, in “The Unconscious Phantasy of an Inner World Reflected in Examples from Literature” (1952); see Athol Hughes, ed., The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers, 1920–1958 (London: Karnac Books, 1991), 317, alluding to “countless never-ending influences and exchanges between ourselves and others.” Our internal objects, Riviere writes, continue to lead their lives “within us indivisible from ourselves” (320). 30. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 9. 31. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 205. 32. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 9 33. Prose Works, 2:64. 34. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 11. 35. See [William Dalmeida], An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Earl of Abergavenny East Indiaman, Captain John Wordsworth, Off Portland, on the Night of the 5th of Feb. 1805; Drawn

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from Official Documents, and Communications from Various Respectable Survivors, by a Gentleman in the East-India House (London: Lane, Newman, and Co., 1805). Wordsworth thought this account the most reliable, mentioning the motto drawn from Richard III on its title page; see Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 560–61n, 564–65. 36. Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 28 March 1805, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 574); see also ibid., 552, for Wordsworth’s concern about the burial. After the wreck on 5 February, John’s body was not recovered until 20 March 1805 and was buried in an unmarked grave along with other recovered bodies (see Ketcham, Letters of John Wordsworth, 50–51). 37. Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 610. 38. Wordsworth might well have associated “tender-hearted Simonides” with his tenderhearted sailor brother—“the tenderest Poet that could be / Who sang in ancient Greece his moving lay” (ibid., 584, ll. 12–13; cf. Prose Works, 2:52). 39. Prose Works, 2:52. 40. Barbara Johnson, “L´esthétique du mal,” in Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 26–27. 41. See “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940), in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1986), esp. 159–60. 42. Ibid., 162. Cf. Wordsworth in The Ruined Cottage: “The Poets in their elegies and songs, / Lamenting the departed call the groves, / They call upon the hills and streams to mourn” (ll. 73–76). 43. “At this stage in mourning, suffering can become productive. We know that painful experiences of all kinds sometimes stimulate sublimations, or even bring out quite new gifts in some people, who may take to painting, writing, or other productive activities under the stress of frustrations and hardships” (Selected Melanie Klein, 163). 44. For the role of affect in writing such as de Man’s and Derrida’s, see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotions after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Terada discusses Derridean emotion, particularly in Derrida’s Mémoires for Paul de Man, in relation and in response to de Man’s figure of prosopopoeia (Feeling in Theory, 128–51, esp. 134–40). Terada calls this Derrida’s “conversation with the dead de Man” (146)—a perceptive reading that bears on Work of Mourning. 45. Derrida, Given Time, 129n. 46. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 43. 47. For a philosopher’s discussion of Derrida in relation to Levinas, see Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), esp. chs. 3, 4. Critchley’s argument relates particularly to the ethical (and political) aspects of deconstruction. See also Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), on the obscurity of Levinas’s expression and thought, including his concept of “face.” 48. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 67. 49. Ibid., 68. 50. Ibid., 10. 51. Derrida, Given Time, 24.

196  |  notes to pages 100–102

52. Ibid., 7. 53. Ibid., 12. 54. For the status of “impossibility,” an influential strand in Blanchot’s thought (involving both what lies outside discourse and what is anterior to being), see Hill, Blanchot, where “the impossible” is defined “as that which escapes affirmation and negation alike and exceeds all such dialectical oppositions or contraries” (138). 55. For an influential discussion of the gift from a phenomenological perspective, see Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 71–118. Marion aligns himself with Derrida only to the extent of finding in his reading the basis for a counterinterpretation, seeing within it the possibility of a problematic return of metaphysics that rests in exposing a contradiction rather than probing its depths (79–81). For a penetrating account of Marion’s argument about the phenomenology of exchange, see Simon Jarvis, “Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift,” Angelaki 6, no. 2 (2001): 67–77; for a critique of Derrida for his latent economism, see also Simon Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” Dionysius 17 (1999): 201–22. I am grateful to Simon Jarvis for timely guidance in the area of gift theory; my own reading differs in emphasizing the role of both psychoanalysis and Blanchot in Derrida’s thought. 56. Derrida, Gift of Death, 47. 57. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 105. 58. See Derrida, Gift of Death, 84: “Levinas is no longer able to distinguish between the infinite alterity of God and that of every human. His ethics is already a religious one. . . . The border between the ethical and the religious becomes more than problematic.” 59. Wordsworth’s letters often make use of this turn of phrase: for instance, “God grant me life and strength,” and “[I] pray God to give me strength” (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 547, 565). 60. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 209. 61. See “Prayer without Demand,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 232. For Volozhiner, according to Levinas, “the act of study constituted in itself the most direct communication with a transcendent, non-objectifiable God” (ibid., 228). 62. Ibid., 233. 63. Ibid., 234. 64. Cf. the elegy for John written the following year, “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle” (1806): “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn” (l. 60). 65. Derrida, Gift of Death, 49. 66. Ibid., 96. 67. Ibid., 97. 68. See Wordsworth’s letter to James Losh, 16 March 1805, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 563, quoted above. 69. Derrida, Gift of Death, 97. 70. Ibid., 98. 71. Derrida, Given Time, 101. 72. Ibid., 102. 73. Ibid., 36, 129n.

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74. See ibid., 58–59. Mallarmé´s poem has various titles and versions (“Le jour,” “Le poème nocturne,” “Dédicatrice du poème nocturne”). Mallarmé´s gender politics are inevitably problematic (conception as masculine, reading as feminine). His miserable neonate is invoked in the course of Derrida’s reading of a different transaction, almsgiving (aumône)—a stinted giving that leeches the gift of any generosity (see ibid., 57–58). 75. See ibid., 73–78, 78–82. Derrida rereads Claude Lévi-Strauss´s tribute to (and critique of) Mauss in Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss as “exchangist, linguisticist and structur­ alist” (Given Time, 76). Benveniste’s “Gift and Exchange in Indo-European Vocabulary,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale, is similarly seen as pointing to a semantic ambivalence that belongs more generally to language itself: “Language gives one to think but it also steals, spirits away from us . . . it carries off the property of our own thoughts even before we have appropriated them” (Given Time, 80). 76. Ibid., 172n. The poem is by Michel Deguy and appears in his collection Donnant donnant (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 57. 77. Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 11 (cited in Derrida, Work of Mourning, 149). 78. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 142. 79. Ibid., 147–48. 80. Ibid., 149. The passage from Marin’s introduction begins: “Le préfixe re-importe dans le terme la valeur de substitution. Quelque chose qui était présent et ne l’est plus est mainten­ ant représenté. À la place de quelque chose qui est présent ailleurs, voici présent un donné, ici; image? Au lieu de la représentation, donc, il est un absent dans le temps ou l´espace ou plutôt un autre, et une substitution s´opère d´un autre de cet autre, à sa place” (Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image, 11). Derrida’s reading includes the example of the substitution of the body as announced by the angel at the tomb and relates to the primitive power of this scenario of ontological transfiguration (see Derrida, Work of Mourning, 149–53). 81. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 153. 82. Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 534. Probably composed in August 1803 and completed in this form between March 1804 and early 1807. 83. For Marin’s sense of the voice as inscribed in poetic figures, see his introduction: “Mais si les périodes et les strophes, les phrases et les vers, les mots, les consonnes et les voyelles peignent en montrant et si le langage fait voir, c’est par la force qui le traverse et que ses organizations hierarchisées articulent: c’est par la force qui en déplace, si l’on peut dire, la transparence instituée: c’est par la chair de la voix que signes et letters, mots et phrases informent” (Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image, 22). 84. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 157. 85. Ibid., 157, 157–58. 86. Ibid., 158. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 158–59. 89. Ibid., 159. 90. Ibid., 160. 91. Ibid., 161.

198  |  notes to pages 105–9

92. Ibid., 164. 93. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 30. 94. Ibid., 75. 95. Ibid., 31. 96. Ibid., 30, 31. 97. Ibid., 69. 98. Ibid., 441. The anecdote is cited from Judith Robinson, L´analyse de l´esprit dans les cahiers de Valéry (Paris: José Corti, 1963). Blanchot comments: “Of course the image remains very unsatisfying since here discourse . . . only calls upon what one might name the principle of deferred speech” (Infinite Conversation, 441). 99. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 441n. 100. Ibid., 77. 101. Ibid., 70. 102. Ibid., 78–79. 103. Ibid., 429: “Let us say briefly that if the book can always be signed, it remains indifferent to whoever would do so; the work . . . requires resignation, requires that whosoever claims to write it renounce himself as a self and cease designating himself.” 104. See Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, esp. chs. 6 and 7, for an account of Blanchot’s relation to and understanding of “the work.” See also Hill, Blanchot. 105. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 433–34. chapter 6 1. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 26. 2. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1941), 1:139–40. 3. Ibid., 133. 4. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For Derrida’s own “Final Words,” trans. Gila Walker, see The Late Derrida, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 244: “Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival.” 5. Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 26. 6. Ibid., 24. 7. Ibid., 51–52. 8. Ibid., 24. 9. D. W. Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958), in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Karnac Press, 1990), 30. 10. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 579–80. Dorothy records that the second part (“Half an hour afterwards”) was repeated by Wordsworth to Coleridge on 22 April; see Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 1:136. 11. Winnicott, “Capacity to Be Alone,” 29. 12. Ibid., 30.

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13. Ibid., 33. 14. Ibid., 34. 15. Ibid., 34. 16. Ibid., 36. 17. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1997), 78. 18. Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 580. 19. The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Wordsworth might have had “The Knight’s Tale” in mind in spring 1802 when he and Coleridge (like the friends Arcite and Palamon) pursued, not the same beloved, but two symbolically identified sisters, Sara and Mary Hutchinson. 20. Nancy, Gravity of Thought, 2. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Ibid., 79. 23. Ibid., 77, 78. 24. Ibid., 79. 25. Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 277. 26. Nancy, Gravity of Thought, 80. 27. Ibid., 76. 28. Ibid., 77. 29. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 5. 30. I am grateful to Sara Guyer for drawing my attention to her work on wakefulness at the time of delivering a shorter version of this paper and for her illuminating chapter “The Rhetoric of Wakefulness,” in her Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 141–59. See also “Breath, Today: Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71,” in ibid., 160–86. For an indispensible discussion of the importance of thought and its relation to “Sleep-Thinking” in Wordsworth’s poetry, see also Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 153–94. Jarvis—whose reading puts unusual pressure on the poetic aspect of Wordsworth’s “philosophic” thought—uses the concept of dream-thought to explore the Descartian dream of the Arab Quixote in Prelude, book 5. 31. Guyer, “Rhetoric of Wakefulness,” 143. Guyer also explores the significance of changes to the original order of Wordsworth’s trio of sonnets “To Sleep” (148). 32. Ibid., 145. 33. As Guyer concludes, in terms highly relevant to the subject of this essay, “To read Wordsworth with Levinas is thus to encounter the wakefulness, the ceaselessness, the survival that attends apostrophe—to discover the impossibility of arresting that wakefulness by way of a figure” (ibid., 159). 34. Nancy, Fall of Sleep, 5. 35. Prose Works, 2:85. 36. Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes, 140. 37. Ibid., 140–41.

200  |  notes to pages 118–24

38. Ibid., 141–42. 39. Nancy, Fall of Sleep, 3. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Ibid., 13. 42. Ibid., 14, 15. 43. Ibid., 29. 44. Ibid., 31. 45. Ibid., 43–44. 46. Nancy ends by citing Baudelaire’s “Le gouffre” (“The Chasm”), from Les fleurs du mal, on the vertiginous fear of sleep as an infinite, abyssal hole (ibid., 47–48). 47. Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 34. 48. Ibid., 32–33. 49. Ibid., 52. chapter 7 1. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, Michael C. Jaye, and David Garcia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 243. 2. Denis Diderot, “Addition to the Preceding Letter” [Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See], in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, trans. and ed. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago: Open Court, 1916), 144. 3. William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 214, 254. 4. William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 102; “blinder” supplied by the editor. 5. William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 75. 6. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 275. 7. See John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2.9.146. For an account of the subsequent philosophic fate of this question, see William R. Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), esp. 21–38. 8. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45. The words “unbeseen” and “unbeknownst” are used to translate l’invu and l’insu; see Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999), 50. 9. For a recent discussion of Wordsworth’s poetry in terms of alternations in perspective and seeing, see Edward Larrissy, The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 102–40. 10. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 20. 11. For Derrida’s discussion of The Book of Tobit, see ibid., 24–31. For the “desacralization” of blindness in the wake of its curability and the Enlightenment cultural construction of

notes to pages 124–31  |  201

blindness, see Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind, esp. 3–20, and for education, 95–120 passim. 12. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 37. 13. Ibid., 128–29. Marvell’s poem begins: “How wisely Nature did decree, / With the same eyes to weep and see!” (ll. 1–2). Throughout Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida uses the refrain “Vous croyez?” with its implications of skepticism and its questioning of the evidence of perception, as well as agreement and disagreement on the part of an imaginary interlocutor; see translators’ note, ibid., 1. 14. Ibid., 33. 15. Ibid., 3. 16. Ibid., 32. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 52. 21. Ibid. (ellipses Derrida’s). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 257. 22. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 53. 23. Ibid., 66, fig. 30: François Stella (1563–1605), Ruins of the Coliseum in Rome. For the importance of ruins as Benjaminian emblems of history merged with nature, see also Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1997), esp. 1–23. 24. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 65. 25. See ibid., 88 and note. 26. Ibid., 65, 68. 27. Ibid., 68. 28. Ibid., 69. 29. MS D; see William Wordsworth, “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar,” ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 45. 30. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 69. 31. Ibid., 70. 32. See Beyond the Pleasure Principal (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), 18:31–32. 33. Diderot quotes Condillac “when he writes that, ‘had the life of man been only an uninterrupted sensation of pleasure or of pain, happy without prospect of pain, wretched without any prospect of pleasure, he would have rejoiced or suffered; and that if he was so constituted, he would not have looked about him to discover if some influence were well disposed towards him, or desired to injure him; it is only the alternation between these two conditions which causes him to reflect’” (Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 132). 34. William Wordsworth, Essays upon Epitaphs, in Prose Works, 2:64; see chapter 5 above for the association of death by drowning with John Wordsworth.

202  |  notes to pages 131–37

35. Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739) came to Cambridge in 1707 and was appointed Lucasian Professor in 1711. He was subsequently elected to the Royal Society and became the friend of Newton and Halley. His most famous invention was his calculating machine for the blind. 36. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 113. See Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind, 39–71, for an extended account of the relation of Diderot’s Letter to the long tradition of philosophical argument about touch and sight, and 57–70, for a detailed analysis of the ambiguous arguments made by Saunderson on his deathbed. 37. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 82. Diderot refers mischievously to a nonexistent, unexpurgated work, “printed in Dublin in 1747, and entitled The Life and Character of Dr Nicholas Saunderson, late Lucasian Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; by his disciple and friend William Inchlif, Esq.” (ibid., 115). Diderot’s ruse was not successful when it came to avoiding prosecution, although there is evidence that Saunderson’s religious views were unorthodox. See Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds, ed. Marion Hobson and Simon Harvey (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 181n65, 182n68. 38. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 115. 39. “The Life and Character of the Author,” in Nicholas Saunderson, The Elements of Algebra, in Ten Books, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1741), 1:ii. 40. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 101; cf. Saunderson, Elements of Algebra, 1:vi. 41. See Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 90–100. For a detailed account of Saunderson’s “Palpable Arithmetic” and “calculating table,” see Saunderson, Elements of Algebra, 1:xx–xxvi. See also Michael Kessler, “A Puzzle concerning Diderot’s Presentation of Saunderson’s Palpable Arithmetic,” Diderot Studies 20 (1981): 159–73. 42. For Diderot’s use of blindness to transform “the epistemological primacy of the visual” into a relational system, see Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind, 50–56. 43. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 84. 44. Ibid., 87. 45. Ibid., 105, 104. 46. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 101–2n. 47. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 100. According to Saunderson’s memoir, “His Discourse was so enlivened with frequent Allusions to objects of Sight, that there appeared no Deficit of the blind Man” (Saunderson, Elements of Algebra, 1:xviii). For the relation between geometrical abstraction and poetic language in Diderot, see Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind, 50–51. 48. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 107; cf. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 101. A touching account of Saunderson’s sensitivity to his surroundings is provided by his memoirist: “I have been present with him in a Garden, making Observations on the Sun, when he has taken notice of every Cloud that disturbed our Observation, almost as justly as we could. He could tell when any Thing was held near his Face, or when he passed by a Tree at no great Distance, provided the Air was calm, and little or no Wind. These he did by the different Pulse of the Air upon his Face” (Saunderson, Elements of Algebra, 1:xxii). 49. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 108, 123.

notes to pages 138–41  |  203

50. “Addition to the Preceding Letter” in ibid., 155, 156; cf. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 101. Diderot’s speaker uses the adjective clairvoyants to describe the unsighted. 51. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 128–29. 52. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 51. 53. Ibid., 92, fig. 53, and 138–39. 54. Derrida describes this “entoptic phantasm” or “fascinated hallucination” as follows: “The face presumed to be that of the author emerges from a frame, but within the frame. It overflows the portrait in order to see you looking at what it pretends to show you with an index finger pointing down towards the center, toward this third, open eye, whose lid is raised like a theater curtain onto a scene that in turn overflows the eye’ (ibid., 93). 55. Ibid., 94. 56. See Michael Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” in W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: New Directions, 2004), 11. As Hamburger reveals, there are enigmas, puzzles, and contradictions in Sebald’s texts, not least in his appropriation of Hamburger’s own autobiography in Rings of Saturn; see chapter 2 above. 57. Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” 9, 11–12. 58. See W. G. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp,” in Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted, 88; Sebald pointedly references Gombrich on trompe l’oeil. 59. Ibid., 85. 60. Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted, 23. 61. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese,” 89. 62. Ibid., 90. 63. Ibid., 91. 64. Ibid., 91, 92. 65. Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted, 83. 66. Ibid., 25. 67. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese,” 95. Hamburger notes that “the dog Maurice/Moritz, so close to Max Sebald, died not long after Max’s early and sudden death” (“Translator’s Note,” 12). 68. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 12. 69. See Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted, 57. 70. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese,” 86. The reference is to Maurice MerleauPonty, “Eye and Mind” (“L’oeil et l’esprit”); see The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnston and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121–50. 71. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese,” 86. 72. See, for instance, the now classic discussion of the reading/seeing confusion in Neil Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 59–60. See also Geraldine Friedman, “History in the Background of Wordsworth’s ‘Blind Beggar,’” English Literary History 56, no. 1 (1989): 125–48. For the “second-sight procession,” Celtic seers, and the

204  |  notes to pages 141–46

“host of the dead,” as well as the ethics of visibility in Prelude, book 7, and in The Excursion, see Larrissy, The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period, 127–32. 73. Making a related point about Enlightenment knowledge, Paul Fry remarks perceptively that Newton’s “living face, with its famous optics, must be reduced to its blind simulacrum.” See Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 133. 74. See Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 113. 75. Ibid., 117. Diderot is echoing the authentic “Life and Character” of Nicholas Saunderson: “It is said of the philosopher Democritus that he put out his Eyes, to enable him to think the more intensely; ‘imagining,’ says Tully, ‘the Acuteness of the Mind was taken off by the Sight of the Eye’” (Saunderson, Elements of Algebra, 1:x). For Diderot’s own use of the prism as shorthand for Newtonian optics, see David Berry, “Diderot’s Optics,” in Studies in EighteenthCentury French Literature, ed. J. H. Fox, M. H. Waddicor, and D. A. Watts (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1975), 20. 76. For Condillac’s philosophy of the senses, see Philosophical Writings of Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, trans. Franklin Philip (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 163–64. chapter 8 1. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; with Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1795), 1:276. Hutton’s foundational work on geology, first published in 1788 as part of the Royal Society of Edinburgh transactions, links geology to the argument for intelligent design, “thus connect[ing] the mineral system of the earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits” (ibid.). 2. MS D; see William Wordsworth, “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar,” ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 49. 3. See Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72. Derrida points to Benjamin’s “startling intuition” that having been named renders nature sad, giving rise to “a mute but audible lament through sensuous sighing and even the rustling of plants”; see The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 18–20. 4. Wordsworth’s late poem “Written in a Blank Leaf of Macpherson’s Ossian” makes the common association of Ossian’s voice with the language and music of nature; see William Wordsworth, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 610–12. 5. See William Wordsworth, Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed. Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 510, 769. 6. See ibid., 450. 7. For a penetrating consideration of Wordsworthian inscription as “impossible writing,” see Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78–100 passim. Bennett points to the inscription’s detachability from the stone or place where it is supposedly written (85–89). For the centrality of the inscription to Wordsworthian criticism and Romanticism more generally, see, e.g., Geoffrey Hartman’s seminal essay “Wordsworth,

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Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. F. W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 389–414. In relation to deconstructive criticism, see also Cynthia Chase, “Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth’s ‘Rude Embryo’ and the Remaining of History,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 50–77. 8. Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 1:106. 9. See William Wordsworth, A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, in Prose Works, 2:175: “In other places rocks predominate; the soil is laid bare by torrents and burstings of water from the sides of the mountains in heavy rains; and not infrequently their perpendicular sides are seamed by ravines (formed also by rains and torrents) which, meeting in angular points, entrench and scar the surface with numerous figures like the letters W. and Y.” 10. A rare literal instance of such chiseled “graffiti” is preserved in the salvaged “Rock of Names,” now standing in the grounds of Dove Cottage and bearing the carved initials of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their beloved family circle. See also Wordsworth’s invocation to the “dearest Spot! dear Rock of Names,” in Benjamin the Waggoner, l. 496; and Bennett, Wordsworth Writing, 84, 200–201n17. 11. See John Beer, Wordsworth in Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 103–4, for the reminder of a literary source for Joanna’s reechoed laughter in Drayton’s Polyolbion, noted by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria. Beer’s extended reading (102–7) subtly explores the link between daimonic laughter, Wordsworthian extravagance, and the sublimity of the imagination. 12. “In Cumberland and Westmoreland are several inscriptions upon the native rock, which from the wasting of Time and the rudeness of the Workmanship had been mistaken for Runic. They are without doubt Roman”; see William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 246. 13. Ibid. 14. Wordsworth’s Guide refers to the effect of the mountain Helvellyn in similar terms: “the mind is overcome with a sensation, which in some would amount to personal fear, and cannot but be awful even to those who are most familiar with the images of duration and power, and other kindred influences, by which mountainous countries controul or exalt the imaginations of men” (Prose Works, 2:283). 15. See William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 126. Subsequent references are to the reading text of this edition (123–29). 16. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry makes it clear that the Leech Gatherer was a beggar; see The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1941), 1:63. 17. For Wordsworth’s later account of “the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination” (“The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate

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it to the stone”), see “Preface of 1815,” in Prose Works, 3:33. A particularly fascinating account of the genealogy of Wordsworth’s “huge Stone,” or erratic boulder, is to be found in Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 30–53; for Heringman’s concern with the rock as sensate “thing,” see 32–37. 18. For conflicting theories involving the deposit of glacial erratics, see John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31; and for the connection between glacial erratics and Deluge-like floods of rain, see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 237–79. In the series of “Letters” appended to editions of Wordsworth’s Guide in the 1840s, the Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick refers to his speculations about the glacial origins of “the bowlders which have floated over our valley, and are, in thousands of places, stranded on the mountain sides, and sometimes perched on their tops”; see Adam Sedgwick, Complete Guide to the Lakes: compris­ ing minute directions to the tourist . . . and four letters on the geology of Lake District (Kendal: J. Hudson and Longman, 1846), 229, and cf. 172–73. 19. For Wordsworth’s ability to entertain both theories at the same time (i.e., both repeated flooding and a single catastrophic event), see Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists, 40–43. Wordsworth’s Guide later refers to the mysterious provenance and melancholy appearance of isolated upland pools and huge stones in language reminiscent of the Leech Gatherer: “round the margin, huge stones and masses of rock are scattered; some defying conjecture as to the means by which they came thither; and others, obviously fallen from on high—the contribution of ages!” (Prose Works, 2:187). 20. For a perceptive discussion of noncommunication both in and about “Resolution and Independence,” see Bennett, Wordsworth Writing, 113–18. 21. Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 228. 22. Cf. Hutton, for whom the possibility of continuous processes of renovation as well as decay was indispensible to the argument for intelligent design: “we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end” (Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 1:200). 23. See Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/ Performance (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2010), 84–87. Dean’s film, installed at Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York, in 2008, was included in the Guggenheim Museum show Haunted (2010). 24. “Obsolescence is about time in the way film is about time: historical time; allegorical time, analog time. . . . I like the time you can hear passing: the prickled silence of mute magnetic tape or the static on a record”; see ibid., 89, quoted from George Baker, ed., “Artist’s Questionnaire: 21 Responses,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 26–27. 25. For a discussion of Dean’s Sound Mirrors (1999) in the context of durée and memory, see Nat Trotman, “Sound Mirrors,” in Blessing and Trotman, Haunted, 88–90. Dean’s film focuses on acoustic detection devices built on the Kent coast near Dungeness prior to World War II to provide advance warning of air attack: “Vast walls and hemispherical dishes positioned at the edge of the English channel, the sound mirrors performed too well, indiscriminately gathering every noise within their range to a single, cacophonous focal point” (ibid., 88). 26. Dean’s film about the poet and translator Michael Hamburger similarly uses as its

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analogue soundtrack the rushes and pauses of the wind in the fruit trees of his overgrown orchard. For a discussion of Dean’s Michael Hamburger, see chapter 2 above. 27. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 5, 6. 28. Ibid., 7. 29. Ibid., 7–8. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Ibid., 21. 32. Ibid., 22. 33. Ibid., 26. 34. Ibid., 31, 34–35. 35. Ibid., 40. 36. See Landon and Curtis, Early Poems and Fragments, 515, 522, 530. 37. See William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 144; and Butler and Green, Lyrical Ballads, 140. 38. For Wordsworth and Winnicott, see, e.g., Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 148–69. For discussion of the infant babe passage from Prelude, book 2, see also André Green, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1999), 284. 39. On Wordsworth’s philosophic ambitions, see Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 1–21. For The Excursion, see Sally Bushell, Re-reading “The Excursion” (London: Ashgate, 2002), esp. 85–94. 40. See Freud’s “Negation” (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), 19:235–39. 41. Cf. books 3 and 4 of The Excursion for the history of the Solitary and the proposed correction to his “despondency.” 42. For one of the few sustained discussions of “Point Rash-Judgment,” see David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 95–105. Simpson’s reading draws attention to issues of labor and value while making connections between the worlds of eighteenth-century war and exploration and the distressed figures Wordsworth encountered at home. 43. Prose Works, 2:181. 44. For Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Written upon a Blank Leaf in ‘The Complete Angler,’ ” see William Wordsworth, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 80–81, 110n; Izaac Walton (“Whose pen, the mysteries of the rod and line / Unfolding,” ll. 3–4) is described as a keen observer of nature. 45. See Prose Works, 2:403. The theory that Stonehenge and other British stone circles were built for Druid worship was inaugurated by John Aubrey in the seventeenth century and repeated by William Stukeley in the mid-eighteenth century. Guides to the Lakes that Wordsworth would have known, such as William Gilpin’s, regularly attributed northern stone circles to the Druids.

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46. The section “Druidical Monuments” in the expanded 1783 edition of Grose’s Antiquities of England and Wales refers to stone circles as “places of worship and council” but relates legends often associated with them (e.g., “by the vulgar supposed to have been once men, and then transformed as a punishment for playing on the Lord’s day a game called hurling”); see Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 8 vols. (London: Hooper and Wigstead, 1783), 1:140, 135. 47. See Prose Works, 2:195 and note, 301. 48. See ibid., 195; first published in the third edition of 1822. Long Meg also bears “cup and ring” petroglyphs. For detailed information about Lake District stone circles, see ibid., 403–4nn. For the later text of the sonnet, see Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 609, and for a further detailed description of the circle, see 651–52n. 49. Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 638. Wordsworth’s account of his first sight of the monument in the winter of 1820–21 is described in a letter to George Beaumont of 10 January 1821; see The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, part 1, 1821– 1828, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. and ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 4–5. 50. See Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 65, 104n. 51. “Between the banks of the Cassiquiare and the Oroonoko . . . these hieroglyph figures are often placed at great heights on the walls of rock, that could be accessible only by constructing very lofty scaffolds. When the natives are asked how those figures could have been sculptured, they answer with a smile, as if relating a fact of which a stranger, a white man only, could be ignorant, that ‘at the period of the great waters, their fathers went to that height in boats’”; see Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, A Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1788–1804, trans. H. M. Williams, 4 vols. (London, 1819); quoted in Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 104. 52. See http://rockartuk.fotopic.net/c399791.html. 53. See Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 64–65, 103–4n. 54. Ibid., 85n. 55. Ibid., 76. 56. Ibid., 77. Wordsworth refers also to Coleridge’s projected poem “The Brook” (ibid., 76). 57. Ibid., 76. 58. Ibid., 86. 59. One of the sonnets from Wordsworth’s Scottish tour of 1833 draws on a similar creationist trope: “the sovereign Architect, / Has deigned to work as if with human Art!” (sonnet 28, ll. 13–14); see Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 593. In his unpublished essay “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” Wordsworth also refers to “the chaotic appearance of crags heaped together, or seemingly ready to fall upon each other,” as exciting “sensations as uncomfortable as those with which he would look upon an edifice that the Builder had left unfinished” (Prose Works, 2:359). 60. See Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 84, 104–5n. See also Wordsworth’s account in the Guide: “those circles of upright stones, large and perfect, which we are accustomed to call Druids Temples” (Prose Works, 2:301).

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61. See Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 105n: “some famed Temple where of yore / The Druids worshipped” (1850 Prel. 2.101–12). 62. Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes dedicated to the lovers of landscape studies, and to all who have visited, or intend to visit, the lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (Kendal: W. Pennington; London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1778), 178–79; the site was known as Mayborough. 63. Ibid., 179. 64. William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 248. For the aesthetics of formlessness in Wordsworth’s “Ode,” see Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, esp. 88–91. Wyatt notes Wordsworth’s concern in the “Ode” with both historical time and “an ever-present natural world, depleted though it is by extinction”—a world “which appears to be complex, chaotic, and ultimately indescribable” (Wordsworth and the Geologists, 139, 162). Cf. Wordsworth’s account in the Guide of Scawfell Pike’s “huge blocks and stones that lie in heaps on all sides to a great distance, like skeletons or bones of the earth not needed at the creation” and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1818 letter (Prose Works, 2:242, 367). By midcentury, botched creation had given way to Sedgwick’s scientific metaphor: “the earth is a great laboratory and storehouse of experiments” (Sedgwick, Complete Guide to the Lakes, 211). 65. In his brief discussion of “Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone,” Paul Fry points not only to its confusions of past and present, or human and nonhuman, but to the transition from stone to green; see Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 195–96. Writing from the standpoint of what he calls evocatively “stone-colored criticism,” Fry wonders apropos of the “greening” of Wordsworth “whether the nature poetry of Wordsworth is green or gray”—“‘rocks and stones’ make up two thirds of the Wordsworthian cosmos. The other third being Lucy—‘thing’ that she once seemed and now is—and the trees” (74, 72). 66. This is a reference to the cave of the water nymph Egeria, beloved by Numa Pompilius. 67. See Ketcham, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, 254. 68. Prose Works, 2:240. 69. See Sedgwick, Complete Guide to the Lakes, 240. The kirk-(church-)shaped stone of Kirkstone Pass provides another instance of such tautological naming. 70. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” in Prose Works, 2:351. 71. Ibid., 351–52. 72. See William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland, 2 vols. (London: R. Blamire, 1786), 1:194; quoted by William Green, The tourist’s new guide, containing a description of the lakes, mountains, and scenery, in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, with some account of their bordering towns and villages (Kendal: R. Lough, 1819), 132–33. Green mocks Gilpin’s claim that the space beneath the “Bowder Stone” would have been “sufficient to shelter a troop of horse” (subsequently the overhang had been made into a sheep pen), commenting skeptically: “Surely, Mr. Gilpin, these must be the horses of Liliput” (133). 73. Sedgwick, Complete Guide to the Lakes, 174–75.

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74. Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” in Prose Works, 2:356, and for Wordsworth’s disappointment, ibid., 456. 75. For what Fry aptly calls “the ‘mineral’ or bedrock basis of ontology in Wordsworth,” see Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 80. 76. Alice Oswald, Woods etc. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 16.

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index Concept of History,” 37, 46, 55, 182nn3–4, 185n84; “On Language as Such,” 150, 205n3; “On the Theory of Knowledge,” 59– 60; and photography, 56, 182n4, 183n39, 184n44; and ruins, 7, 46, 55, 202n23; and survival, 115; “The Task of the Translator,” 4 177n8; and the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 22, 47 Bennett, Andrew, 190n13, 205n7, 206n10, 207n20 Benveniste, Émile, 105, 198n75 Berkeley, George (Bishop), 139, 147 Berlin, 39–40, 41, 44–46 Bewell, Alan, 207n18 Bible, King James, 41 Blackmun, Harry ( Justice), 61, 67 Blanchot, Maurice: “The Absence of the Book,” 113; and conversation, 96, 194n16; and Derrida, 96, 194n16, 197n55; and désoeuvrement, 8, 96, 98, 105, 113, 199nn103–4; and “the impossible,” 96, 194n16, 197n54; The Infinite Conversation, 96, 110–12, 194n16, 199n103; “Interruption (as on a Reimann Surface),” 110–12, 199n98; and Levinas, 111, 112; The Writing of the Disaster, 123 Bloomfield, Robert, 15 Borges, Jorge Luis, 142 Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas, 191n24 Bowder Stone, 172–73, 173 fig. 8.5, 174 fig. 8.6, 210n72 Braidwood, Thomas, 190n16 Brennan, William J. ( Justice), 61 Brougham Castle, 170 Brown, Bill, 177n9 Bruns, Gerald L., 194n16 Buchloh, Benjamin, 56, 57, 185n67, 199n104 Buell, Lawrence, 75 Burns, Robert, 15, 107

Allen, Dr. Matthew, 16, 179n18 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 53–54, 53 fig. 2.5 Anderson, Katherine, 180n21 animals, 5, 7, 33, 66–69, 70–72, 75, 115, 144, 146, 151, 157, 163, 188n35, 188n39 anthropology, 5, 64, 76, 101, 178n10, 178n15, 186n10 anthropomorphism, 5, 62, 63–64, 72–73, 74, 75, 150, 153, 172, 174 Appadurai, Arjun, 178n15 Aristotle, 70–71 Ashbery, John, 16, 27 Aubrey, John, 208n45 Auden, W. H., 189n6 Auschwitz, 52, 123 autobiography, 47–48, 131–32, 137, 146, 189n3, 191n30, 204n56 Aveyron, Wild Boy of (Victor), 87 Bacon, Francis, 142 Badt, Kurt, 25 Bahti, Timothy, 178n12 Balfour, Ian, 182n3 Barrell, John, 15, 16 Barthes, Roland, 143, 195n20 Bate, Jonathan, 73, 74, 75, 188n46, 188n48, 188n51 Baudelaire, Charles, 201n46 Baynton, Douglas C., 191n21 Beaumont, Sir George, 134–35, 135 fig. 7.2, 209n49 Beckett, Samuel, 142 Beer, John, 206n11 Benjamin, Walter: and the Angel of History, 7, 46, 55; The Arcades Project, 36, 56; and citation, 36, 182n3; and history, 36–37, 182nn3–4, 185n84, 202n23; “Little History of Photography,” 183n39, 184n44; “On the

213

Burroughs, William, 142 Butades, 141 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 16 Cage, John, 9, 159, 160 fig. 8.2, 161 fig. 8.3 Cambridge, University of, 138–39, 147, 203n35 Carlson, Trevor, 159 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 143 Cézanne, Paul, 32, 34, 57, 146 Chase, Cynthia, 178n12, 206n7 Chaucer, Geoffrey, “The Knight’s Tale,” 120, 200n19 Clare, John, 6, 14–20, 27, 34, 35; and the asy­ lum, 179n18; “ A Beautiful Sunset in November,” 18–19; and birds, 15, 16, 18, 33; and Byron, 16; Child Harold, 16; and clouds, 14–20; and depression, 6, 14, 15–20, 179n18; “I am,” 15, 33; “ Journey out of Essex,” 16, 18, 20; “The Meadow Grass,” 16, 34; and observation, 16–18; as ploughman poet, 15; and urbanization, 15, 20; and weather, 15, 16, 20 Claude, Lorrain, 22 climate change, 19, 20, 25–26, 179n6 clouds, 6–7; and atmospheric pollution, 19–20, 21; and Clare, 14–20, 27, 35; and cloud-spotting, 10, 178n3; and Constable, 11, 12–13, 22–31, 33, 34–35; and Damisch, 10, 12–13, 33; and Forster, 10, 12, 13, 25–26; and Goethe, 11; and Merleau-Ponty, 11–12; and meteorology, 10, 11, 13–14, 22, 25–26; and mood, 15, 27, 29–30, 34; and Romantic lyric, 10, 13–14 ; and Shelley, 10; and Words­ worth, 11 Clymer, Lorna, 189n3 Coetzee, J. M., 71, 188n39 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 89, 92, 93, 114, 118, 192n43, 199n10, 200n19, 206nn10–11, 209n56 Coliseum, Roman, 133, 136, 202n23 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 86, 139, 147, 202n33, 205n76 Connor, Steven, 177n9 Constable, John, 6–7, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22; and cloud studies, 11–14, 20, 22–35, 27 fig. 1.3,

28 fig. 1.4, 29 fig. 1.5, 30 fig. 1.6, 31 fig. 1.7; and Forster, 12, 13, 22, 24, 25–26; and Hamp­ stead Heath, 13, 25–26; and Howard, 22, 25, 26; and internal states, 27–30, 34; and meteorology, 11–13, 22, 25–26, 31; and observation, 30–31; and six-footers, 27–28; and sky, 13–14, 25; and sociability, 33–34; and Stour Valley, 22; and volcanic eruptions, 20 Correggio, 12–13 Crabbe, George, 30–31, 181n66 Critchley, Simon, 196n47 Cronin, Richard, 190n10 culture, 36, 42, 48–49, 57, 71, 84–85, 101, 190n11, 190n18 Cunningham, Merce, 9, 159–60, 160 fig. 8.2, 161 fig. 8.3 dactylology, 85–86 Dalmeida, William, 195n35 Damisch, Hubert, 10, 12–13, 33 Darwin, Charles, 71 Daston, Lorraine, 178n15 Davis, Colin, 196n47 Day, John A., 178n3 de Man, Paul, 4, 79, 82, 88, 92, 189n3, 191n30, 196n44 deaf education, 8, 79–80, 84–88, 190n15, 190n16, 190n18, 190–91nn20–21, 191n24 deafness, 2, 6, 79–88 Dean, Tacita: Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS, 9, 159–60, 160 fig. 8.2, 161 fig. 8.3, 207n23; Michael Hamburger, 7, 36– 37, 40, 40 fig. 2.2, 42–44, 44 fig. 2.3, 45 fig. 2.4, 47, 48, 207n26; Sound Mirrors, 160, 207nn23–25 Deguy, Michel, 198n76 Derrida, Jacques: and archi-écriture, 163; and Barthes, 195n20; and Blanchot, 96, 194n16, 197nn54–55; and Diderot, 130, 138; and the gift, 8, 101–5, 194n16, 197n55, 198n74, 198n75; and “the impossible,” 96, 102, 105, 194n16, 197n54; and late writings, 4, 199n4; and Levinas, 96, 97–101, 102–3, 195n19, 196n47, 197n58; and Marin, 96, 105–10, 198n80,

214  |  index

198n83; and Mauss, 101–2, 198n75; and Merleau-Ponty, 31, 34, 63, 64–67, 75–77, 130, 132–33, 186n10; and Nancy, 63, 64–66, 163, 187n19; and psychoanalysis, 65–66; and ruin 133–34, 133 fig. 7.1, 136–37, 149; and selfportraiture, 133–37, 204n54; and survival, 8–9, 114, 115, 127; and touch, 7, 63–66; and the unbeseen, 9, 130, 132, 136, 147, 201n8 Derrida, Jacques, works of: Adieu, 97–99, 101, 102, 195n19; The Animal That Therefore I Am, 144, 205n3; “Che cos’è la poesia?,” 3–4, 5, 73–74, 177n7, 188n52; The Gift of Death, 101, 102–4; Given Time, 101–5, 195n26; Learning to Live Finally, 114–16, 127, 198n4, 199n4; Memoirs of the Blind, 9, 34, 129–38, 133 fig. 7.1, 140–42, 147, 201n8, 201n11, 202n13, 204n54; On Touching, 61, 63–66, 75–77; The Work of Mourning, 95–99, 101, 103, 105– 10, 195n20, 196n44, 198n80, 199n4 Descartes, René, 33, 34, 139 Deschamps, Claude-François (abbé), 86 Desloges, Pierre, 86 Diderot, Denis: Letter on the Blind, 9, 128, 130, 138–41, 147, 202n33, 203nn36–37, 203n42, 203n47, 204n50, 205n75 disability, 70, 81, 132, Douglas, William O. ( Justice), 61, 65, 67 Dresden, 37, 52, 55, 56 Druids, 9, 153, 154, 167, 169, 170, 171–72, 206n12, 208–9nn45–46, 209nn48–49, 209n60, 210n60 duration, 2, 122, 159–60, 170–71, 172, 206n14 Dürer, Albrecht, 38, 39 fig. 2.1 Earl of Abergavenny (ship), 94, 99–100, 193n5, 195n35 ecopoiesis, 73, 74 environmentalism, 5, 7, 15, 20, 61–63, 70, 75 l’Epée, Charles-Michel (abbé), 85, 86, 190n20, 191n24 Eyck, Jan van, 143 Faverjon, Jean-Marie, 141–2, 204n54 Ferenczi, Sándor, 62–63, 186n7

Ferguson, Frances, 186n6, 186n8, 192n37 Fisher, John (Bishop of Salisbury), 13, 20 Fontenay, Saboureux de. See Saboureux de Fontenay Forster, Thomas, 10, 12, 13, 16, 22, 25–26 Fox, Charles James, 88 François, Anne-Lise, 177n2 Frankfurt, 51–52, 54, 55 Freud, Sigmund: and bodily ego, 164; and consciousness, 67; and death, 101, 115, 177n2; and dream, 132; and mourning, 98; and negation, 69, 187n31; and Psyche, 65, 67, 187n19; and trauma, 137 Friedman, Geraldine, 204n72 Friedrich, Caspar David, 59 Frow, John, 178n13 Fry, Paul, 174, 205n73, 210n65, 211n75 Gallaudet College, 191n21 gift theory, 8, 64, 101–5, 193n4; 194n16, 197n55, 198n75 Gilbert, William, 192n47 Gill, Stephen, 193n1 Gilpin, William, 172, 173 fig. 8.5, 208n45, 210n72 Goethe, J. W. von, 11, 21, 25 Gombrich, Ernst, 143 gravitation, 1–2, 3, 92, 121, 124 Green, André, 208n38 Green, William, 169, 172, 174 fig. 8.6, 210n72 Grose, Francis, 167, 168 fig. 8.4, 209n46 Grünewald, Matthias (Mathis Nihart), 51, 52 Guyer, Sara, 123, 178n12, 200nn30–31, 200n33 Halley, Edmond, 203n35 Hamblyn, Richard, 10, 178nn3–4, 179n7 Hamburg, 37, 55 Hamburger, Michael, 7, 36–48, 40 fig. 2.2, 44 fig. 2.3, 45 fig. 2.4, 49–52, 54, 142, 182n7, 204n56, 204n67; String of Beginnings, 44–48 Hamilton, Richard, 142 Harris, Sir Arthur (“Bomber”), 55

index  |  215

Hartman, Geoffrey: and epitaphs, 68, 88, 191n37; and inscriptions, 205n7; and Lucy, 2, 177n2; and “Mutilated Bower,” 62, 186n5 Heaney, Seamus, 15; “ After the Fire,” 7, 36, 41– 42, 60, 182n11; “The Apple Orchard,” 7, 36, 37–38 Heidegger, Martin: “Das Ding,” 2, 3; and ecocriticism, 7, 72–75, 188n46, 188n48, 188n51; and language, 74; and modernity, 57; and Nancy, 64 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 189n65 Heraclitus, 138 Heringman, Noah, 206–7n17, 210n64 Hertz, Neil, 204n7 Hill, Leslie, 194n16, 197n54 history, 2, 7, 8, 17, 36–38, 42, 52, 54–56, 59, 90, 131, 138, 146, 182nn3–4, 185n64 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: Lord Chandos Letter, 50–51, 182n4, 183n42 Holcroft, Thomas, 191n24 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 41, 42, 72, 50, 73, 182n9, 185n67, 202n23; and Homburg, 41, 182n9 Holme, Thomas, 80, 82–84, 190n10, 190n16 Homer, 133, 134 Horace, 150 Howard, Luke, 10, 11, 13, 22, 25, 26, 178n3 Hughes, Ted, 7, 43 Humboldt, Alexander von, 167, 209n51 Husserl, Edmund, 77 Hutchinson, Mary, 193n3, 200n19 Hutchinson, Sara, 187n16, 200n19 Hutton, James, 150, 152, 152 fig. 8.1, 205n1, 207n22 Jacobs, Carol, 183n23 Jacobus, Mary, 189n3, 208n38 Jankovic, Vladimir, 180n21 Jarvis, Simon, 178n10, 193n4, 197n55, 200n30, 208n39 Jay, Martin, 181n84 Johns, Jasper, 142 Johnson, Barbara, 100, 178n14 Johnson, Samuel, 190n16

Kant, Immanuel, 12, 125 Kemble, Mrs. Charles, 191n24 Klein, Melanie, 100–101, 196n43 Kluge, Alexander, 54–55 Kohler, Andrea, 183n25, 184n51 Kotzebue, August von, 191n24 Lacan, Jacques, 31, 34, 77, 125 Lane, Harlan, 190n15 Larrissy, Edward, 201n9, 204n72 Latour, Bruno, 178n13 Levinas, Emmanuel: and Blanchot, 111, 112; and Derrida, 96, 97–101, 102–3, 195n19, 196n47, 197n58; and otherness, 97, 98, 106, 111; and prayer, 103,113, 197n61, 200n33; and Wordsworth, 123, 200n33 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 195, 198n75 l’informe, 11, 14, 179n9 Llewelyn, John, 72–73 Locke, John, 130, 139, 147, 201n7 Long Meg, 167, 172, 209n48 Louvre, Musée du, 131, 133 lyric: and apostrophe, 1, 2; and Auschwitz, 123; and clouds, 7, 13, 29–30; and elegy, 95, 100; and epitaph, 1–2, 3, 6, 116, 122, 123, 127, 189n3; and gift, 8; and pastoral, 38; and sleep, 123, 125, 126; and things, 2, 5, 177n2, 177n5; and thought, 2–4, 115–16, 119–20, 121; and utterance, 116–17,118–19, 122. See also Rilke, Rainer Maria; Wordsworth, William Mallarmé, Stéphane, 105, 198n74 Marin, Louis, 96, 105–10, 198n80, 198n83 Marion, Jean-Luc, 197n55 Marvell, Andrew, 131, 202n13 Matlak, Richard E., 193n1 Matthew (Gospel of), 104 Maurice (Moritz), 142, 144, 145 fig. 7.6, 146, 149, 204n67 Mauss, Marcel, 101–2, 198n75 McCullers, Carson: “ A tree. A rock. A cloud,” 6 memory: and aural memory, 81; and com­ munal memory, 8, 89, 91; and Dean, 207n25;

216  |  index

and Derrida, 3–4, 99, 132, 134, 136; and disavowed memory, 37, 55; and Hamburger, 7, 41–49; and historical memory, 41, 56; and landscape, 92; and literary memory, 37, 43, 50–51; and pastoral, 36; and poetry, 4; and Richter, 56; and translation, 36, 38; and Wordsworth, 8, 94, 98, 119, 153, 193n3, 194n10, 194n12 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 12, 146; “Eye and Mind,” 204n70; and regard pré-humain, 146; The Visible and the Invisible, 31, 32–34, 63, 64–66, 75–77, 130, 132–33, 186n10; The World of Perception, 32, 35 meteorology, 10, 22, 31, 178n3, 180n21 Miles, Dorothy, 190n12 Mill, J. S., 71 Milton, John, 95, 129, 134, 138, 147 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 190n18, 191n20 Mitchell, W. J. T., 178n13 Molyneux, William, 130, 201n7 Monet, Claude, 13 Morganthau, Hans, 55–56 muteness, 38, 88, 116, 117, 150, 183n43; and deafness; 79–80, 82, 84, 87 “Mutilated Bower, The,” 62–63, 66, 68, 186nn5–6 Naess, Arne, 75, 188n53 Nagel, Thomas: “panpsychism,” 69, 187n33; “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” 66–69, 71, 188n39 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 8, 9, 63, 66; The Fall of Sleep, 116, 123–27, 201n46; The Gravity of Thought, 116, 119, 121–22; L’Intrus, 66; Lis­ tening, 162–64, 175; The Sense of the World, 64–66, 72, 186n11, 187n19 Narcissus, 109, 136 negativity, 9, 57, 64, 74, 77, 123, 129, 130, 132, 147, 183n35, 187n31, 188n52, 197n54 Newman, Barnett, 142 Newton, Sir Isaac, 121, 147, 148 fig. 7.7, 203n35, 205n73, 205n75 Nürnberg, 37, 52, 55 Nussbaum, Martha, 70–72, 75, 178n10

Old Sarum, 14 Ong, Walter, 190n11, 190n13 Oswald, Alice: “ Autobiography of a Stone,” 175; “Woods etc.,” 7, 63, 77–78 Panara, Robert, 190n12 Parrhasios, 141, 142 pastoral: and Constable, 22; and Dürer, 38, 39 fig. 2.1; and Heaney, 36, 37–38, 41–42; and Richter, 37, 56–60, 185n74; and Sebald, 7, 36–37, 38–41, 42–48, 50–56; and Virgil, 52, 184n52; and Wordsworth, 73, 75, 88–92, 151, 166, 192n40 Paulhan, Jean, 32, 181n67 Paulin, Tom, 15 Paulson, William R., 201n7, 201n11, 203n36, 203n42, 203n47 Peele Castle, 134–36, 135 fig.7.2, 137 Pereire, Jacob, 85, 86 Phillips, Adam, 17–18 photography: and Benjamin, 37, 182n4, 183n39, 184n44; and Richter, 37, 56–60; and Sebald, 43, 46, 47, 49, 51, 55, 183n23, 183n25 Porter, Roy, 179n18 Poussin, Nicolas, 32 Pretor-Pinney, Gavin, 178n3 Proust, Marcel, 142, 144 Proverbs (Book of), 41 psyche, 62, 63, 65–68, 164, 177n2, 186n11, 187n19 Rée, Jonathan, 190n15–16, 191n20–21 Regier, Alex, 177n3 Reimann Surface, 110–11, 199n98 Rembrandt, Harmenzoon van Rijn, 142, 146 Richter, Gerhard: Apple Trees (Apfelbäume), 7, 37, 56, 57–60, 58 fig. 2.6, 59 fig. 2.7, 60 fig. 2.8; Atlas, 56–57; and Baader-Meinhof group, 185nn64–65; and history painting, 56–57, 60, 185nn64–65; and landscape, 57– 58, 185n74; and photography, 37, 56–57, 185n64 Rigby, Kate, 74

index  |  217

Rilke, Rainer Maria: “ After the Fire,” 7, 36, 41–42, 182n11; “The Apple Orchard,” 7, 36, 37–38; Duino Elegies, 74; “Gravitation,” 1–2; and nature, 3, 57, 74 Riviere, Joan, 195n29 rocks: and animism, 69, 187n34; and anthro­ pomorphism, 150, 153–54, 172, 174; and the Bowder Stone, 172–73, 173 fig. 8.5, 174 fig. 8.6, 210n72; and Druids, 9, 153, 154, 167, 169, 170, 171–72, 206n12, 208n45, 209n46, 209n49, 209n60, 210n60; and elegy, 150, 151, 172; and epitaphs, 89, 93, 126, 151, 164; and geology, 150, 155, 169, 207n17, 207n18, 207n19, 210n64; and induration, 2, 3, 170– 71; and inscription, 89, 152–3, 206n10, 206n12; and “ Joanna’s Rock,” 9, 153–54, 165, 167, 206n11; and the Leech Gatherer, 154– 55, 172, 206n17; and Long Meg, 167, 172, 209nn48–49; and Lucy, 1, 69, 171–72, 210n65; and naming, 153–54, 170, 172, 206n10; and philosophy, 150, 154; and po­etry, 151, 169–70, 174–75, 210n65; and reading, 173–75; and rock art, 168–69, 170– 71, 209nn51–52; and sound, 9, 150, 151, 153– 54, 160, 164; and stillness 9, 159–60; and stone circles, 167, 170, 172, 208–9nn45–6, 209n48, 209n60; and stones, 64–65, 66, 74, 87, 88, 147, 151–52, 155; and subjectivity, 164, 211n65; and the sublime, 174, 209n59; and tourism, 9, 165, 172, 173 fig. 8.5, 174 fig. 8.6, 206n9 Romanticism: and blindness, 130, 134, 201n7, 201n9, 202n11, 204n72; and clouds, 10; and disillusion, 164; and elegy, 6; and Ger­ man, 42; and “green” Romanticism, 5, 7, 61, 73, 210n65; and the human, 149; and land­ scape, 57, 58; and lyric, 6, 13, 123; and me­ teorology, 11; and natural description, 15, 22; and sleep, 126; and subjectivity 22, 25, 34 Rothko, Mark, 13 Roubiliac, Louis-François, 147, 148 fig. 7.7

ruins: and Benjamin, 7, 202n23; and Derrida 133–34, 133 fig. 7.1, 136–37, 149; and Sebald, 42, 45–46, 53–56, 184n62; and Words­ worth, 9, 134, 136, 149, 151, 167 Ruskin, John: Modern Painters, 20–22, 23 fig. 1.1, 24 fig. 1.4, 25, 28 Saboureux de Fontenay, 85–86 Sacks, Oliver, 189n6, 191n21 Salisbury Cathedral, 14 Salvator (Rosa), 22 Santner, Eric L., 183n42 Saul of Tarsus (Paul), 134 Saunderson, Nicholas, 9, 138–41, 140 fig. 7.3, 147, 203nn35–37, 203n41, 203nn47–48, 205n75 Schumann, Robert, 47 Sebald, W. G.: and Hamburger, 36–36, 38–41, 42–48, 49–51; and Hofmannsthal, 50–51, 183n42; and Maurice (Moritz), 142, 144, 145 fig. 7.6, 146, 204n67; and memory, 39– 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57, 183n35, 184n51; and muteness, 51, 183n43; and pastoral, 36–48; and photography, 43, 46, 47, 49, 52, 55, 56, 142, 183n23, 183n25, 183n39, 184n44; and post-war Germany, 36, 55, 184n50, 184n62; and ruins, 42, 45–46, 53–56, 184n62; and Tripp, 48–49, 50, 130, 142–6, 143 fig. 74, 145 fig. 7.5, 204n58 Sebald, W. G., works of: After Nature, 7, 37, 51–54, 55, 60, 184n52, 184n59; “ Air War and Literature,” 37, 54–55, 184n59; Austerlitz, 41; The Emigrants, 183n23; On The Natural History of Destruction, 37, 54, 55– 56, 184n59, 184nn62–63; The Rings of Sat­ urn, 7, 36–37, 38–41, 42, 44–51, 204n56; Unrecounted, 9, 36–37, 47, 48–49, 51, 130, 142–46, 143 fig. 7.4, 145 fig. 7.5, 145 fig. 7.6, 183n25 Sedgwick, Adam, 172, 173, 207n18, 210n64 self-portrait, 6, 9, 51, 129, 130–34, 136–37, 141– 42, 143, 146–47, 149

218  |  index

sense, 4–5, 7, 63, 64–66, 74, 125–26, 129–30, 138–41, 147, 162–64, 190n8 Shakespeare, William: Richard III, 99, 195n35 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10 Sicard, Roch-Ambroise (abbé), 86–87 Sierra Club, 61 Silesia, 41, 46, 48 Sinclair, Iain, 15, 20, 180n37 Simonides, 100, 107, 196n38 Simpson, David, 208n42 Snow, Edward, 182n11 sound: and the body, 150, 154, 163; and the deaf Dalesman, 7, 79–83, 190n13; and Dean, 43, 159–60, 160 fig. 8.2, 161 fig. 8.3, 207n24– 26; and echolocation, 67; and “ Joanna’s Rock,” 9, 153–54; and the Leech Gatherer, 155, 163; and listening, 154, 162–74; and nature, 114, 117, 124–25, 150; and poetic composition, 84, 95, 101, 190n13; and po­ etry, 2, 77–78, 117, 126, 154, 163–64, 190n8, 190n12, 205n4; and The Prelude, 115, 150, 162; and rocks, 9, 150–51, 163, 164; and trees, 77–78; and Wright, 80–82, 189n2, 198n8; and writing, 154 Stella, François, 133, 133 fig. 7.1, 136 Stewart, Susan, 179n8 Stone, Christopher, 61–62, 70, 186n3 stones. See rocks Stukeley, William, 208n45 subjectivity, 5, 7, 9, 64, 67–69, 75–76, 108, 118, 123–25, 162 Suffolk, 13, 26, 39–40, 41, 43, 44, 46–47, 49 Tambora, Mount, 20 Terada, Rei, 178n10, 191n30, 196n44 things: and gravity, 1–9; and Heidegger, 2, 3, 72–73, 74; and the human thing, 3, 4, 5, 9, 130, 144, 149, 166, 167; and language, 2, 5, 74, 86, 172, 188n51; and Lucy, 1–2, 63, 210n65; and memory, 144, 160; and muteness, 3, 50–51, 116–17, 183n43; nonhuman things, 5, 9, 64, 69, 70, 72, 75, 146, 151, 153, 174, 178n13;

and no-thing, 125–26; and other­ness, 9, 66–69, 72, 98, 106, 164; and poetry 2, 3–4, 5, 63, 66, 70, 73–74, 78, 122, 177n7; and rights of, 7, 61, 70, 72; and thing theory, 4, 5, 177n9, 178n13, 178n15; and thought, 3, 4, 68– 69, 122, 177n3; and unseen things, 47, 129 Thomas, Edward, 188n46 Thompson, Benjamin, 191n24 Thornes, John, 11, 19–20, 179n6 Tiffany, Daniel, 177n5 Titian, 22 Tobit (Book of), 201n11 touch: and blindness, 34, 136–7, 139–41, 203n36, 203n48; and clouds, 33; and deafness, 79, 80, 81, 85; and Derrida, 4, 7, 34, 61, 63–66, 76–77, 136–37; and Lucy, 1–2; and Merleau-Ponty, 4, 32, 64, 66, 75–77, 189n65; and Nancy, 4, 64–65, 72; and “Nut­ting,” 7, 61–63, 66, 68, 78 translation, 2, 6; and Benjamin, 4, 177n8; and Hamburger, 7, 36–38, 41, 43–44, 50; and Heaney, 37–38, 41–42; and history, 37, 41; and memory, 36, 38, 40; and pastoral, 41; and poetry, 74; and Rilke, 37–38, 41–42, 182n11; and uprooting, 40, 41 trees: and apple trees, 7, 36, 37–38, 40, 41– 44, 182n7; and Dean, 7, 37–40, 42–44, 48, 207n26; and Hamburger, 37, 41, 42–44, 48; and Heidegger, 72, 74; and Hölderlin, 42; and insentience, 2, 3, 62, 63–65, 70–71, 78; and legal standing, 7, 61, 70, 186n3; and Lucy, 1, 2, 63, 69, 172, 210n65; and the “Muti­ lated Bower,” 62–63, 66, 68, 186nn5–6; and nuts, 66–69, 71, 72, 75, 184n52, 186n6, 186n8; and “Nutting,” 7, 61–66, 68, 72–74, 77–78, 186n1, 186nn5–6, 186n8; and or­ chards, 7, 36, 37–38, 43–44, 46, 48, 51, 182n7, 184n63, 207n26; and poetry, 74, 77–78; and Richter, 7, 37, 57–60; and Rilke, 36, 37–38; and Sanskrit, 171; and sound, 79, 81–82, 84, 91, 189n2, 190n13; and touch, 7, 63, 64, 66, 68–69

index  |  219

Tripp, Jan Peter: Unrecounted, 9, 47, 48–49, 50, 130, 142–46, 143 fig. 7.4, 145 fig. 7.5, 145 fig. 7.6, 183n25, 204n56, 204n58 trompe l’oeil, 12, 48, 141–43, 204n58 Troubles, the (Irish), 41–42 Turner, J. M. W., 22 Valéry, Paul, 111, 199n98 Virgil, Eclogues, 52, 184n52 Volozhiner, Hayyim (Rabbi), 103, 197n61 Walt Disney Enterprises, 61 Walton, Izaac, 208n44 Warner, Marina, 183n43 Weever, John, 98, 195n27 West, Thomas, 170 White, Gilbert (of Selborne), 17 Williams, Helen Maria, 167 Winnicott, D. W., “The Capacity to be Alone,” 8, 116, 117–19, 120, 121, 124, 208n38 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, 179n6 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 8, 114, 116, 117, 119, 194n9, 199n10, 206n16, 210n64; Grasmere Journal, 114, 119 Wordsworth, John: and “The Brothers,” 92, 93; and death at sea, 8, 92, 94–95, 100, 102, 111, 135, 193n1, 193n3, 193n5, 193nn7–8, 196n36; and “Distressful gift!,” 8, 94–113, 194n12–13; and East India Company, 92, 94–95, 192n50, 193nn3–5, 193n7; and Essays upon Epitaphs, 92, 98, 99, 100; and “ John’s grove,” 93, 114; and Simonides, 196n38 Wordsworth, William: and blindness, 137– 38, 146–48, 201n9; and deafness, 8, 79–84, 86, 93, 190n15, 190n16; and death of John Wordsworth, 92, 94–113, 193n1, 193n5, 193nn8–11, 196nn35–36, 202n34; and Dis­ charged Soldier, 156, 166; and ecopolitics, 70, 73, 75, 210n65; and epitaphs, 3, 8, 79, 84, 87–88, 92, 98–99, 115–16, 122, 123, 126–27, 151; and geology, 155, 169, 170–71, 206n17, 207n18–19, 210n64; and inscriptions, 88, 93, 121, 153, 154, 167, 191n37, 205n7, 206n10, 206n12; and insomnia, 123–27; and

language, 92, 122, 124, 150, 154, 155, 177n3; and Leech Gatherer, 9, 154–56, 158, 163, 173, 187n16, 206nn16–17, 207n19; and listening, 150–51, 154, 163; and London Beggar, 146–47, 149, 156, 204n72; and Lucy, 1, 2, 63, 65, 69, 172, 210n65; and lyric utterance, 116–22, 127; and “Moods of [his] own mind,” 7, 29; and “Mutilated Bower,” 62–63, 66, 68, 186nn5–6, 186n8; and negativity, 9, 64, 69, 74, 123, 129, 130, 132, 147; and Newton, 147; and pantheism, 70; and prayer, 94, 97, 103, 113, 197n59; and Rilke, 3; and ruins, 9, 134, 136, 149, 151, 167; and signs, 8, 82, 84–88, 158; and stone circles, 167, 169, 170–71, 208n45, 209n49, 209n49, 209n60; and the sublime, 174, 206n14, 209n59, 211n74; and survival, 115, 127; and thought, 4, 7, 31, 77, 122, 164, 177n2, 178n10, 200n30; and touch, 7, 61–63, 66, 68, 78; and Winander Boy, 112–13, 163 Wordsworth, William, works of: “ Airey-Force Valley,” 81–82; “ American Tradition,” 167– 69; Benjamin the Waggoner, 206n10; The Borderers, 128, 147, 163; “The Brothers,” 88–93, 151, 192n37, 192n40, 192nn37–38, 192nn42–44, 192nn46–47; “The Deaf  Dales­ man,” 7–8, 79–88, 137, 189nn1–3, 189n5, 190n10, 190n13; Descriptive Sketches, 129; “Distressful gift!,” 8, 95–113, 194nn12–13, 197n59; “Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns,” 107; “Elegiac Stanzas,” 9, 18, 134– 36, 137, 197n64; Essays upon Epitaphs, 79, 84, 87–88, 90, 92, 93, 98–99, 100, 122, 124, 126–27, 137, 189n1, 191n30, 195n27; An Even­ ing Walk, 129; The Excursion, 80, 84, 88, 90, 128, 137–38, 165, 189n1; Guide through the District of the Lakes, 152–53, 165, 167, 172, 206n9, 206n14, 207nn18–19, 210n64; “Hart­ leap Well,” 115, 151; Home at Grasmere, 129; “I find it written of Simonides,” 100, 107, 196n38; “I have thoughts that are fed by the sun” (“Half an hour afterwards”), 8, 119–22; “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” 119; “The Idiot Boy,” 150–51; “Immortality

220  |  index

Ode,” 8, 93, 122, 129; “Incipient Madness,” 134; “ Joanna’s Rock,” 9, 153–54, 165, 167, 206n11; “Lines Left upon a seat in a Yewtree,” 164–65; Lyrical Ballads, 4, 69, 88, 150, 192n37; “Michael,” 88, 134, 192n37, 193n3; “Miscellaneous Sonnets,” 123–25; “Nutting,” 7, 61–66, 68, 72–74, 77–78, 186n1, 186nn5–6, 186n8; “Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone,” 171– 72, 174, 210nn64–65; “The Old Cumber­ land Beggar,” 157–59, 160; “Old Man Trav­ eling,” 157–58, 160; “Personal Talk,” 83–84; Peter Bell, 188n35; “Poems on the Naming of Places,” 152–54, 165–67, 206n11; “Point Rash-Judgment,” 165–67, 208n42; The Pre­ lude, 5, 9, 11, 62, 69–70, 79, 80, 83, 84, 104, 112–13, 115, 119, 121, 124, 129, 131, 134, 146–7, 149, 150, 151, 156, 162, 163, 164, 170, 186n1, 187n34, 194n14, 200n30, 204n72, 298n38, 210n61; “Resolution and Independence,” 9, 154–56, 173, 187n16, 206nn16–17, 207n19, 207n20; “River Duddon Sonnets,” 167–71, 209n51, 209n59; The Ruined Cottage, 134,

150–51, 172, 196n42; Salisbury Plain, 188n35; “ A slumber did my spirit seal,” 1–2, 69, 171– 72, 210n65; “The Solitary Reaper,” 163–64; “There was a Boy” ( Winander Boy), 112– 13, 163; “These chairs they have no words to utter,” 3, 8, 116–17, 119, 122, 199n10; “The Thorn” (1800 note), 2, 177n3; “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” 63; “Tintern Abbey,” 3, 4, 73, 162; “To Sleep,” 8, 122, 123– 27, 200nn30–31, 200n33; “To the Daisy,” 100, 194nn11–12; Tour, 267; The Vale of Esthwaite, 151; “We Are Seven,” 115–16; “ A weight of awe not easy to be borne,” 167; “Written in a Blank Leaf of Macpherson’s Ossian,” 205n4; “Written upon a Blank Leaf in ‘The Complete Angler,’” 208n44 World War II, 36, 37, 52–56, 207n25 Wright, David, 8, 79, 81–82, 189n2, 189n6, 190n8 Wyatt, John, 155, 207nn18–19, 210n64 Zeuxis, 141, 142 Zuckerman, Lord Solly, 184n62

index  |  221