Wordsworth’s Autobiography: The Metonymy of Self
Thomas Pison
From: Literature
and History, Vol. III, Edited by H. Garvin [Bucknell University Press,
Lewisburg, Pa.; 1977], pp. 78-95. Citation
When a man sits
down to write his autobiography, the genre confronts him with a single
condition: that it be a truthful narration of a life. The biographer also must
meet the same condition; yet it is instructive to consider the great difference
in his perspective, procedure, and criteria of truth. The biographer’s subject
is viewed as an object, a finished human product that is acclaimed to be worthy
of public attention. From a presumed vantage point of objective detachment, the
biographer scrutinizes evidence of documentary nature before proceeding to draw
a portrait based primarily upon verifiable fact. Although the best biographers
render this truth convincing through their own insights and style, their
readers focus attention on the narrative itself, and the story of a life
becomes a new acquisition to their storehouse of knowledge. In the case of
autobiography, a reversal is required on every point.1 Because the
autobiographer is both perceiving subject and
1 The works on the theory of autobiography are
few. Certainly the most important include Georg Misch, Geschichte der
Autobiographie der Antike (Frankfurt: Schulte & Bulmke, 1949-67); Wayne
Shumaker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954); Roy Pascal, Design and
Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); and
James Olney, Metaphors of Self The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton
University Press, 1972). Much of the significant work in recent years has
appeared in essay form. See Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions et limites de
l’autobioraphie," in Formen der Selbstdarstellung, Festgabe für Fritz
Neubert, ed. Gunter Reichenkron ) Berlin: Duncker & Humnlot, 1956); Jacques
Voisine , "Naissance et evolution du terme litteraire
autobiographie," in La Littèrature comparèe en Europe orientale ,
confèrencc de Budapest 16-29 octobre 1962; (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1963);
Barrett Mandel, "The Autobiographer’s Art," Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 27 (Winter 1968): 215-26; Jean Starobinski, " Le Style de
l’autobiographie," Poétique, no. 3 (1970); Wilhelm Dilthey, "Der
Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften," in
Gesammelte Werke (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1968), 7: 79-152; and Francis R.
Hart, "Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography," New Literary
History, 1 , no. 3 (Spring 1970):185-511.
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perceived object --- because he is narrator of a story of which he is also the
hero -- the autobiographer, in the midst of an ongoing process that is his
life, nevertheless feels compelled to explain and justify that life in terms of
a higher order. Taking his own past as his theme, he gazes retrospectively upon
the myriad details there in order to discern an emergent shape or contour that
has governed and now defines his life. Although he may occasionally rely upon
diaries and letters, his tools are largely his own memory and imagination,
which produce a truth highly individualized, subjective, and human. Since they
are absolutely free choices on his part, the style and tone of the
autobiographer assume a major significance for the reader; indeed, it is this
implicit reference to the present self and its interaction with its past selves
that grips the reader of autobiography. Fascinated by the revelations arising
from this interplay of past and present, the reader of autobiography almost
forgets to inquire about absolute or verifiable truth and, instead, gives
himself over in sympathetic and ironic identification with a man who is trying
to make some sense out of his life. What is sought and gained in the experience
of autobiography is not an addition to knowledge but the total response of a
whole human being to another within the same temporal process.
It is probably best to admit at the outset, then, that the autobiographer is a
great liar. His prevarication thrives on the unconscious as well as the
conscious level. In the act of public self-definition, he may simply forget and
omit, or deliberately distort and suppress the stuff of his life. As Andre
Maurois states in Aspects of Biography, ‘‘The memory is a great artist’’ perhaps
only less so, one could add, than the imagination. And when the autobiographer
happens to be an artist at the height of his powers, it is even more inevitable
that his truth will be at the service of his design. Furthermore, the nature
and substance of the truth he finds in his life will always be determined by
the moment in time at which the autobiographer pauses to consider it; an
autobiography written in early maturity will assume a different and even
contradictory shape from one written by the same man in a later maturity. (One
can only marvel at the oppositions there would be, for instance, between an autobiography
written by Newman as an Anglican and the Apologia we now have.)
Finally, there exists the inescapable subjectivity of any shape that is cast
over the multiplicity of a life, the utterly arbitrary nature of any
construction that is built over chaos. But just as quickly as one asserts that
the autobiographer by
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necessity must prevaricate, one must add that it does not matter, because truth
is served in a deeper, more final, and more humanly satisfying way. For if the
autobiographer is unfaithful to his past, to his present he is bound with
absolute fidelity. Even when he is lying about the past, he cannot lie about
the present, for his mode of speaking will reveal him, regardless of his conscious
intentions. The contemporary self-reference of the narrator discovers a system
of symptomatic traits that reveal an authentic and original image, no matter
how he may mistreat the facts of his life. It is this very system of
repression, evasions, and obsessions, this barrage of psychological defenses,
both supported and betrayed by language, that invites the reader to respond to
the truth of feeling rather than the truth of the intellect. This humbling
truth, that human glory is always accompanied by human frailty, reaches the
reader of autobiography through the double dynamism inherent in the genre: the
operations of the narrator upon his material, which constitute a self
temporally (present with the past) and spatially (inner with the outer); and
the continuing evaluation of the narrator by the reader. To the degree that the
autobiographer is self-aware and self-critical within the work proper, he
himself will always be questioning his own "what I am"; to the degree
that he is blinded, the reader will be doing that active questioning.
Wordsworth’s
Prelude is not generally included in histories of autobiography, probably
because most historians have assumed a prose medium for the genre. However, it
represents an extremely valuable document in this history for several reasons.
Like Rousseau’s Confessions before it, The Prelude asserts the primacy of
private experience in opposition to the public duality of previous
autobiographies, such as Gibbon’s Memoirs or Franklin’s Autobiography. (To test
how foreign to Wordsworth is such a public emphasis, imagine a hypothetical
autobiography of his that would put next to Gibbon’s Roman eagle and Franklin’s
practical man of affairs, England’s Poet Laureate.) Moreover, Wordsworth’s
inner life is constantly tested in the working, a balancing feat known to every
human being but curiously omitted from autobiographies that are of the
solipsistic or introspective type, like Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and Descartes’
Discourse de la methode. Although the Prelude is a great achievement of the
fullness and singularity of a life, it is significant in the history of
autobiography because there are two complete versions of it. Thus the customary
two-fold interpretation is all the richer for being threefold, for the narrator
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must deal not only with his past selves, but also with the 1805 narrator.
However, where the critic of autobiography is grateful, the critic of poetry
becomes contentious. Fast upon the appearance of the de Selincourt edition in
1926, Wordsworth’s critics were preternaturally eager to align themselves with
one or the other version. Naively, they were out for truth, and the 1839
version showed a blatant tampering with the past. Wordsworth was thoroughly castigated
for suppressing the Vaudracour and Julia story, for overlaying the Oversoul
with High Church orthodoxy, and for tempering his youthful liberalism with a
stodgy conservatism. His poetic diction was also perused, to correct or confirm
the supposed decline of his powers. Some spoke of a new concreteness and
economy, while others noted a turgidity that stifled the spontaneity of the
original version. Although the autobiographical critic smiles at the polemics
of evaluation, he grimly condemns any blurring of the two versions. The heart
sinks when one encounters the suggestion, in the preface by the scholar who
first published the two Preludes, that the ideal text would be a composite of
the two:
The
ideal text of The Prelude, which the lover of Wordsworth may construct for
himself from the material here presented to him, would follow no single
manuscript. It would retain from the earlier version such familiar details as
have autobiographical significance. Of purely stylistic changes from the text,
it would accept those only which Wordsworth might have made (and some he would
certainly have made), had he prepared the poem for the press in his greatest
period, changes designed to remove crudities of expression, and to develop or
clarify his original meaning: but it would reject those later excrescences of a
manner less pure, at times even meretricious, which are out of key with the
spirit in which the poem was first conceived and executed. Most firmly would it
reject all modifications of his original thought and attitude to his theme. 3
Unfortunately,
Wordsworth’s critics have too often taken de Selincourt’s lead, commonly
quoting from either version, without citation, depending upon which one best
serves their critical argument. The poetry critic may betray an acute ignorance
of autobiographical
2 The text to which I shall refer is William Wordsworth’s "The
Prelude": A Parallel Text, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1971).
3 Ernest de Selincourt, ed. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). Helen Darbishire is the editor of the
revised edition issued in 1959. Emphases in quotation are mine.
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theory that can be dispelled, point by point, only by the theorists themselves.
Precisely because there is never in any autobiography an initial detachment,
its truth will always be poetic and literary, rather than absolute and literal.
The distance between the 1805 narrator and the self as object can no more be
validated than that of the 1839 narrator and his object. Nor is the acclaimed
"spontaneity" of the 1805 version sufficient reason for according it
superiority. Such critical judgment is more indicative of the critic’s Romantic
world-view than it is of the practice of autobiography. Before one can
undertake to shape one's life, the autobiographer must have the sense of having
gone through great transformations to a time of peace and settled living. In
this sense, M. H. Abram's term, crisis- autobiography, is applicable to all
autobiographies.5
Surely, Wordsworth in his early thirties is inappropriately timed for
autobiography, whereas the Wordsworth of sixty-nine, through a long corridor of
time, establishes contours that should be allowed to prevail. Those critics who
do approve the version published in 1850 do so on the basis of improved poetic
technique, and their condemnations collapse under the prevalent suspicion that
"if it’s beautiful it can’t be true". Roy Pascal attacks this ancient
prejudice against art in his insightful book, demonstrating that, in
autobiography, design and truth are not in inverse relationship to each other.
But perhaps the strongest retaliation comes from Jean Starobinski. In his
brilliant essay on autobiography, he suggests that if the critics will discard
their old definition of style as "form superadded to content, ‘they will
be in a far better position to appreciate the qualities and advantages peculiar
to autobiographical truth. The more fruitful definition that he proposes is
"style as deviation," whereby the narrator’s unique individuality at
any given moment is revealed through a self-interpretation of that contemporary
reality: Style as "form superadded to content" will be judged above
all on its inevitable infidelity to a past reality: "content" is
taken to be anterior to "form," and past history, the theme of the
narrative must necessarily occupy this anterior position.
4 Gusdorf, p.121. See also "Die Objektivierung der
individualität in der Gliederung des Kunstswerkes," in Misch’s Geschichte
der Autobiographie,
pp. 946-55, for the naming of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit.
5 Chap. 2, Wordsworth’s Prelude: the Crisis-Autobiography, in Natural
Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971).
6 See Pascal, Design and Truth, esp. pp. 71-141.
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Style
as deviation however, seems rather to exist in a relation of fidelity to
contemporary reality. In this case, the very notion of style really obeys a
system of organic metaphors, according to which expression proceeds from
experience, without any discontinuity, as the flower is pushed open by the flow
of sap through the stem. Conversely, the notion of "form superadded to
content" implies from its inception discontinuity, the very opposite of
organic growth, thus a mechanical operation, the intervening application of an
instrument to a material of another sort. It is the image of the stylus with a
sharp point, which tends thus to prevail over that of the hand moved by the
writer’s inner spirit. 7
Supporters and detractors alike of the 1850 version assume the
"stylus" rather than the "hand," driving a wedge between
the spirit and the style of the work. The "Two Wordsworth’s" whom
they perceive are not the interacting selves of the autobiographer, but two
separate entities, of whom they prefer the first. It was the 1805 Wordsworth
who cornered the truth, spontaneity, and life of the autobiography; and it is
the joyless old man whose "philosophic mind" has driven out the
poetry, whose analysis has murdered the original experience. Whose search for
essence has sapped existence of its humanity. But, the autobiographical critic
rejoins, when did Wordsworth not pursue the transcendence of the profane, and
why does philosophical analysis not qualify as transcendence? Are these
polarities situated at the opposite ends of growth patterns natural to
Wordsworth, or to people in general? Or perhaps they are complementaries,
finding their expression throughout both his youth and maturity? Is there not,
finally, a continuity between the two versions, a new balance, rather than an
imbalance, of the concrete and the abstract that contributes simultaneously to
a sense of being human in time and out of time?
Starobinski’s analysis of St. Augustine’s Confessions develops insights pertinent
to the uncovering of answers to these questions. Noting that St. Augustine has
two addressees, God, who is summoned directly, and the human auditor, who is
assumed obliquely. Starobinski argues that this double address of the discourse
"makes the truth discursive and the discourse true."
8 Except for very recent autobiographies that assume no frame of
reference for the world and advance no coherent image of the self, this double
address can probably be posited for all autobiographies.
7"The Style of Autobiography," in Literary Style: A
Symposium,
ed., Seymour Chatman (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 285-98. Also L’
Oeil vivant
(Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 91-188.
8 "Style of Autobiography," p. 289.
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The autobiographer sees himself at an eternal court of truth with his book as
his one chance to set straight the record of a life, so help him God. Despite
the psychological impossibility of such fidelity, he swears in earnest not to
falsify or dissimulate. The presence of God insures the truth, but the human
reader requires a narrative to be convinced of this truth. It is, however, not
an omniscient, omnipotent God who requires that the events of a life, which are
going to be offered as somehow exemplary of Truth, is to be laid out in their
causal succession for all to see. The exemplary generalization, which will be
put to our human intelligence as a result of the autobiographer’s
self-knowledge, is validated by the sequential nature of the narrative, which
records the transformation of a past "I" into a present
"I."
If the discourse is true and the truth discursive, then we are always jointly
confronted with the quality of an experience during its happening, and the
meaning of that experience as it is assessed by the present self. The
"I" is justified as both subject and object; the story and truth of a
life do not exist separate from one another. This explains the almost simultaneous
appearance of thought and experience: the tendency in both versions to
immediate generalization and abstraction. Coleridge did not have to be a
theorist of autobiography to recognize these two basic components of discourse
and truth in his friend’s poem: "thy work / Makes available a linked lay
of Truth / Of truth profound, a sweet continuous lay."9
Truth, then, is to be found not in the order of facts but in the order of
process; it does not reside in an external reality but proceeds from the internal
order that a man perceives within his deepest self. All theorists of
autobiography affirm that the autobiographer writes always with a prior sense
of internal order within the self, and that this sense governs the selection
and arrangement of past experience into a coherent whole. Wayne Shumaker’s term
is "the shaping power." Pascal’s is the autobiographer’s
"design." A more recent commentator on autobiography, James Olney,
perceiving that the sense of self determines not only the shape of experience but
the shape of all logical systems as well, calls all autobiography, theology,
philosophy, and physics "metaphors of self." Since the title I have
chosen is a reflection upon the
9 "To a Gentleman, William Wordsworth, Composed on the Night
after His Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind," in
The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966),
pp. 215-16.
10 Olney, Metaphors of Self, pp. 317-32.
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significance of Olney’s work, my metonymy displacing his metaphor, an
understanding of the two terms and their differences is essential.
Olney’s thesis is that the essential oneness of self evolves out of the
balance, poise, and cooperation of opposites, and that this sense of the
subjective self can be communicated only by metaphor or symbol. Metaphor makes
available new relational patterns that simultaneously order the self into a new
and richer entity. "It is only metaphor that thus mediates between the internal
and the external, between your experience and my experience, between the artist
and us, between conscious mind and total being, between a past and present
self, between, one might say, ourselves formed and our selves becoming."
However, metaphor cannot explain the apparent paradox of the One and the many:
that the self that is one and the same on one level is also transformed and
different in passing time.
The addition of metonymy, and specifically a " metonymy of the self,"
resolves this perplexity. The importance to autobiography of both categories
was implicit in Starobinski’s discussion of metonymical discourse and
metaphorical truth. Roman Jakobson discovers that the development of a
discourse takes place along these two different semantic lines: one topic may
lead to another through their similarity (the metaphoric pole) or through their
contiguity (the metonymic pole). A Romantic, Symbolist, or Imagist aesthetic
elevates the metaphoric process, but the predominance of metonymy in Western
culture underlies and actually predetermines the realistic or "prosy"
trend of verbal art that sustains a narrative. Like the novelist, the
autobiographer digresses from plot to atmosphere, from character to setting,
following the path of contiguous relationships.12
The final "metaphor of self" that shapes a life and governs the
design of an autobiography must await its formulation after the metonymical
relationships of a life lived in time have unfolded. Thus the vertical,
synchronic, metaphoric model is at once prior and posterior to the horizontal,
diachronic, metonymical process of life and narrative in the autobiography. It
is in this context, in the gravitational pull between these two bipolarities in
verbal art, that we must locate Wordsworth’s "spots of time.’’ They are
both metonymical and metaphorical in their import, but it is only the latter
relationship that has been
11 Ibid., p. 35.
12 Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1971), pp. 111-116. The essay appeared in Jakobson and Halle,
Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956).
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emphasized in criticism. Their centrality to The Prelude is unquestioned. They
are Wordsworth’s metaphor and metonymy of self, but it is only in the 1850
version that the latter term is fully realized. It required the thought of the
aging 1839 Wordsworth to integrate these spots of time into the metonymical
processes of his life and his narrative: the 1805 Wordsworth had only his
intuition to establish the spots as his metaphor of self. These necessary
distinctions have been obscured by literary critical performances of two kinds,
brilliant and deficient. The brilliant attempt on the spots of time belongs to
Geoffrey Hartman who solicits a genius loci or spirit of the place to account
for Wordsworth’s obsession with specific places, and the power they have to
encapsulate in spots of time the memory of his most precious experiences. The
magical power of place to conjure up past sensations has received its greatest
expression, of course, from Proust. But in Jean Cocteau’s Journal du Inconnu
appears a whimsical and more quotable testimony to the invocative powers of
place. Returning to a place of his childhood, Cocteau runs his hand along the
wall of his old school as he walks beside it. All the sensations return -- but
not until he crouches down to approximate his size as a child -- and repeats
the operation:
L’expérience
n’ayant pas donné grand-chose, je m’avisai qu’à cette époque ma taille était
petite et que ma main! traînant actuellement plus haut, ne rencontrait pas les
mêmes reliefs. Je recommendai le manege. Grâce a une simple différence de
niveau et, par un phénomène analogue à celui du frottement de l’aiguille sur les
aspérites d’un disque de gramaphone, j’obtins le musique du souvenir. Je
retrouvai tout: ma pèlerine, le cuir de mon cartable, le nom du camarade qui
m’accompagnait, ceux de nos maîtres, certaines phrases que j’avais dites, le
timbre de voix de mon grandpère, l’odeur de sa barbe, des étoffes de ma soeur
et de maman.13
The significant
point is that Cocteau had to put himself in the position of a child to remember
and imagine that he once had conceived the landscape as animated. And, as Paul
Shepard has noted, for the adult "the special places of childhood are not
sacred but the memory of them is necessary for attaching sacredness to place .
. . but is not etiological. It is not a supernatural explanation of a natural
phenomenon such as a volcano. It is
13 Journal d’un inconnu (Paris: Grasset, 1953), p. 165.
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rather a realization of the sacred potential of all places."14
Thus, the control over the present is not place itself, but, as Bergson recognized,
the mind’s power to valorize these locations.
In Olney’s terms, man’s sense of self is prior to his knowledge of the external
world, and his metaphor of self is always a projection outward onto the world.
The spots of time, as they convert a real place to an imaginary space in the
human memory, are metaphors, furthermore of metonymical life processes of
before and after. That is to say, the spots of time represent metaphorically
the recognition of nature’s part in the creation of these memories, but what
they express, as Shepard notes, are the varied metonymical rhythms of
"being with and being apart from, coming and going, joining and
separation."The deficient critical performance, shared by many in this
post-Symbolist age, has been the reading of the spots of time out of context,
the slipping of the more prosaic sections in between for these high points.
This process is rationalized and given formal articulation in "the
principle of alternating intensities," by which we are led to expect in long
poems "flat" portions between intense image clusters.15
Ezra Pound, it might be expected, would misread The Prelude in this manner, the
organizing principle of his own Cantos apparently being the roman numerals that
head each section. For Pound, Wordsworth was a "silly old sheep whose
genius" for the natural image, was "buried it in a desert of
bleatings." 16 Pace Pound, the critic of autobiography must
insist upon the primacy of the context for understanding the spots in their
metonymical import. It is the coming and going of the spots, their before and
after, that permits us to make the invaluable distinction between the 1805 and
the 1850 account of their significance in Wordsworth’s life. In the earlier
Prelude, the spots of time seem to fixate Wordsworth. Each one cleaves to his
memories, pulls him into the past,
14 Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: An Historic View of the
Esthetics of Nature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, l977), pp. 30, 37-38, and 12.
Henri Bergson, in his doctoral dissertation, "Quid Aristoteles de loco
sensent" (translated as "L'Idée de lieu," 1889), discusses the
primary place distinguished from the unlimited and the commonplace
distinguished from extension. "Le lieu," he observes "est le
témoin immobile de ces destinées." From the Latin translated by Robert
Mosse-Bastide and Guy Soury. Mélanges: de Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 56, 115.
15 Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s "Prelude"
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 101.
16 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968),
p. 276.
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-and renders him unable to impose his present self upon them; as an
autobiographer, he is unsure of their meaning for his life and, as an artist,
unsure of their place in his poem. The ability to assimilate and accommodate
them to the larger temporal rhythms of his life and poem is not evident until
the later Prelude. There, the spots become much more than poetic strategies for
confounding Newtonian clock time with the human sense of time, for replacing
mere mechanical chronology with a significant accounting, through free
association. They become "clean, well-lighted places" that have
defined the self and given it shape, as opposed to the earlier spots, more akin
to Baudelaire’s "Le Gouffre" with its empty abysses "affreux et
captivant." For Wordsworth, introspection is necessarily retrospection,
and he cannot know, as opposed to intuit, the self without the perspective of
the corridor of time. The conversion of felt experience into thought
recollection is also the transfer of power from nature to the human mind.
An analysis of the two texts reveals much evidence to support these broad
conclusions. The spots of time have been promoted from "affecting
incidents" to "memorials" (1850: 12. 237), and when Wordsworth
has a recollection of his past, he sees himself distinct from "former
selves" (1850: 12. 60-66), "held in absolute dominion by our bodily
eye . . . the most despotic of our bodily senses" (1850: 12. 127-131).
Like Aristotle, Wordsworth has learned that "the object of sight is the
oval of vision," as the spots assume a place in the gradual accumulation
of the past in the present. Unlike his earlier self, he no longer admires
"higher minds" for dealing with "objects of the universe"
(1805: 13. 92), but instead values those minds which contemplate the whole
" compass of the universe" (1850: 14. 92). Thus are the spots evened
out, by spatial expansion and temporal gradation, within the mind of the poet.
That they have found their proper dimension within a larger space and time is
indicated often in the later version by additions that suggest their
therapeutic value to a rememberer already at peace with himself. For example,
at the end of the spot in book 12, beginning "One Christmas time,"
Wordsworth adds that the experience is now "accepted" and allowed to
"animate a vacant hour of ease" (1850: 12. 335).
In the early account of the ascent on Snowdon, the young poet saw the mountain
as the "perfect image" of "an infinity-
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devouring mind . . . awful and sublime" (1805:13. 76). In the later
account, the immediacy of the experience and its singular awesomeness are
sacrificed. When "image" becomes "emblem," then the mind
has become "the type / Of a majestic intellect . . . a mind sustained / by
recognitions of transcendent power" (1850: 14. 66-76). Instead of himself
being transfixed, Wordsorth circumscribes the experience with a higher, ordered,
act of the mind. His self-awareness of his mind’s powers is accompanied by a
recognition of the memory’s lapses. When a memory is referred to, not as a
"history" but as a "narrative," then the poet is
acknowledging the fact that fact may possibly be explicable fiction– explicable
in terms of a present that knows more than the past did about it. And therefore
the vision on Snowdon becomes both distant and ambivalent with the added aside,
"For so it seemed" (1850: 14. 6).
If the 1850 Wordsworth now accepts the "mysteries of Being" (1850:
12. 184-86) as part of a "step by step" (1850: 12. 132) accumulation
that alone leads to wisdom, he also now perceives himself as a "creative
soul" (1850: 13. 207). As he has been created, so has he become creative
through time; and the spots of time, far from conveying instant wisdom and
evincing a foregrounding singularity, are valued instead for the cumulative
effect of their repetition. That effect, and this point will have great
relevance to the particular "daimon" of this autobiographer, is the
contributor of all the spots of time to the "Profoundest knowledge to what
point, and how/ The mind is lord and master" (1850: 12. 220-2).
The reason why Wordsworth’s mind had to become the "lord and master"
is implicit in the nature of the experience that I have been calling "the
spots of time." Since these spots remain the same in both versions, their
special characteristics may be discussed without making distinctions between
them. As was demonstrated, only the context–the metonymical
contiguity–surrounding them is transformed. It was Wordsworth’s unconscious
nature and conscious choice to achieve transcendent wisdom along the horizontal
axis of the temporal rhythms of a lived life; the spots are a record of his
repeated refusal to achieve transcendence in a timeless moment.
Hartman credits Wordsworth’s refusal of transcendence to his constant desire to
"ground himself" in a sensuous marriage of imagination with nature.
The apocalyptic vision is characterized by a break with nature, the imagination
soaring on its own meta-
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phorical constructions, and thereby veering away from experience.17
The movement that Blake and Shelley embrace, Wordsworth avoids. His spots of time
begin without trumpets, casually and gently and, if they rise, it is into an
altogether blurred sense of meaning that always remains immanent within the
place of origin. This "clouding of consciousness" (as exhibited, for
instance, in Book 6, the walking tour of the Alps) is not simply a negative
fear of vertical movement and vertigo but a positive "holding on" to
resist any propulsion upward. Unlike the Blake/Daedalus who himself fashioned
his wings, Wordsworth cannot forget that the sun might melt the wax on his
"Wings of Poesy," and, exposed, he might perish as his father did on
the rocky crags of a mountain. Abjuring Prometheus Unbound and the Ur-Faust as
his models, Wordsworth instead seeks to strike a low profile, somewhat akin to
the Epimetheus of Goethe’s poem "Pandora," who, as an ascetic
visionary, experiences the world ultimately as cosmos.
A perspective upon this state of approach-avoidance in Wordsworth may be gained
from Ludwig Binswanger’s essay "Die Verstiegenheit." Rendered into
English as "Extravagance," the title’s more accurate, although more
awkward, meaning could be translated as "going too far, climbing too high,
wandering beyond a limit." Applicable to the psychopathology of
schizophrenics, it also pertains to existential being-in-the-world. Binswanger
analyzes Verstiegenheit in these terms:
"Extravagance" is conditioned by the fact
that Dasein has "gotten stuck" at a certain experiential locus
(Er-fahrung) from which it can no longer, to use a phrase from Hofmannsthal,
"strike its tent," from which it can no longer break out. . . .
Dasein can no longer widen, revise, or examine its "experiential
horizon" and remains rooted to a "narrow minded," i.e., sharply
limited, standpoint. In this respect, Dasein is "stilled" or
obstinate, but not yet Extravagant, for an additional precondition of
Extravagance is that Dasein rises higher than is appropriate to the breadth of
its experiential and intellectual horizon, that, in other words, breadth and
height are not proportional to one another.l8
Wordsworth’s avoidance of the "rising upwards" prevented the
immediacy of visionary poetry and left him "stalled" in his spots of
time and his clouded consciousness,
17 Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 226.
18 Ludwig Binswangcr, Meaning in the World, trans. Jacob Needleman
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 343, 345-46.
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until such time as the metonymical rhythms of his life could provide for their
clarification.
It is possible to consider Wordsworth’s experience also in cosmological terms.
The contrast made by Conrad-Martius between-the epiphanic moment as Ptolemaic
and the "apophanic" moment as Copernican is instructive here. In the
epiphany, the spot is the place of the excess of meaning, where time is frozen
and being is at the center of a circle, revealed to us in "the ineluctable
modality of the visible." The individual’s relationship to the world is
egocentric to the extreme. In a Copernican transformation, being sees itself in
an insignificant and exocentric relation to the world. In Apophanie, the
individual perceives oneself as a sharer in a world common to oneself, other
men, and nature; and the wisdom one attains will rest upon an evaluative
comparison of all these participating elements. Therefore, the apophanic moment
is always disclosed in an act of reflection, not in a flash of Vision. In 1850
Wordsworth speaks of the tranquillity that is a condition of intellectual love
(1850: 1. 244-50). This is the state for the consummation of the apophany, and
it is absent in 1805. There, the poet is stuck, halfway to epiphany, uninformed
yet by the older poet’s knowledge that one must walk, not climb, to apocalypse.
That we may better follow Wordsworth on this walking tour, it is useful to
return for a moment to James Olney’s theory of autobiography. Olney classifies
all autobiographers into two large, loose groups: those of the single metaphor
and those of the double metaphor: Heraclitus, with his simple yet complex
remark that "Man’s character is his daimon," suggests an essential
distinction between the two groups of autobiographers. Each of the
autobiographers simplex has his daimon, his personal genius and guardian spirit,
a dominant faculty or function or tendency that formed a part of his whole self
and from which there was no escape. . . . For the autobiographer duplex, on the
other hand, the daimon, in any case, can only be described as the self, the whole self
. . . that is revealed to be greater than the sum of all its various parts.20
The autobiographers of the double metaphor are duplex because they are
continually evolving, continually self-aware, reflecting upon themselves
reflecting. By far the rarer of the two varieties,
19 Erwin Strauss, "Psychiatry and Philosophy," in
Psychiatry and Philosophy, ed. Maurice Natanson (New York: Springer, 1969), pp.
81-82.
20 Olney, Metaphors of Self, p. 9.
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they include, in Olney’s estimation, Jung, Eliot, and Montaigne. Olney’s
designation of the daimons of simplex autobiographers also seems judicious; one
can readily agree, that John Stuart Mill’s daimon was the rational mind, that
Darwin’s was the nature of nature as objective fact, and that Newman’s was his
religious conscience. To this last category I would add Wordsworth, his daimon
being the "philosophic mind" represented in the subtitle of The
Prelude, "the growth of a poet’s mind." Keats was close to this
recognition of the essential Wordsworth when he compared himself and
Shakespeare as "chameleon poets" to this "virtuous
philosopher," whose mind was too strong to yield itself to "negative
capability."
There is a real sense in which wisdom can be considered on the side of death
and opposed to life. Once absolute meaning is attached to being, it is no
longer within the life process of becoming. In the 1850 version Wordsworth
exhibits every evidence of being a man who has come through all his crises and
no longer looks for any new changes or development. This state of the simplex
autobiographer is understandably deplored by those who themselves are seeking
the flux and indecision of the poet of 1805. Yet philosophy is also on the side
of mature old age and may culminate in what Erik Erikson has termed "ego
integrity," the sense of having lived a life the only way it could have
been lived and not wishing to do it all over again. If Wordsworth’s moderation
in his maturity is questionable, one might recall the Renaissance emblem,
Titian’s "Allegory of Prudence.’’ It depicts the three animal heads of
Serapis, one of which is the wolf of the past "inflicting us with the pain
of remembrance."21 When remembrance becomes a source of calm
and peace in Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude, one should be hesitant to condemn those
"mellower years" that bring "riper mind and clearer
insight," which lessen the burden of "days past" (1850: 1.
234-38). One need not defend the poet’s religious and political evolution, as
evidenced in the 1850 version, in order to see it in the context of other
choices he made as part of a general movement toward controlling his past and
correcting its excesses. Carlyle’s injunction to "Close your Byron, open
your Goethe!," while being symptomatic of the general disillusionment with
the "drunken boat" that Romanticism had become, may also indicate the
natural configuration of the growth processes from youth to maturity.
21 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber and
Faber, 1958), pp. 25-62.
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In the 1850 Prelude the mind seizes control of all that has been obscured or
indefinite. The revisions by the poet in more than sixty passages suggest the
keen poetic judgment with which he pursued clarity and precision. His
decisiveness is due to the power (a recurrent word in the 1850 revisions) that
he felt had been transferred from external nature to his internal mind. In 1805
Wordsworth had thought that it was some invisible workmanship that makes
discordant elements move in one society. In 1850 he asserts that it is the
music of the mind, allowing one to assimilate all the vexations and terrors of
the past, that allows one to move in concert with others. This movement from
the strength of res extensa to the power of res cogitans, this impulse to make
the outer inner, first developed in his experiences of the spots of time, now
becomes the characteristic movement of his old age toward his youth. The terms
also remind us that in Book 5 of the late version, Wordsworth assumes to
himself a very complex dream, highly reminiscent of Descartes’s famous dream of
December 10, 1619. Much critical indignation has been vented upon Wordsworth’s
apparent appropriation of what, in the 1805 version, had been a friend’s dream.
The critic of autobiography, however, is free to speculate upon the possibility
of the early version’s containing the inevitable prevarication, since at that
point Wordsworth would not have achieved the strenuous mind required for symbolic
interpretation.
At any rate, the closer identification with Descartes in the final Prelude
finds its relevance at other points. Like the poet, Descartes looks to his own
mind for the truth that makes the state of mind such as Wordsworth attains, the
object of his study. Like the melon of Descartes’s dream, which was offered and
refused because it would entail sharing with others, Wordsworth’s shell,
something only one person can listen to, speaks its message to Wordsworth
alone. And like Descartes, Wordsworth prefers those "charms of
solitude," as Descartes terms it, to the "sick hurry" of the
city. Accordingly, at the end of Book 4 in the final version, Wordsworth adds
these words: How gracious, how benign, is Solitude; How potent a mere image of
her sway; / Most potent when impressed upon the mind / With an appropriate
human centre. (1850: 4. 356-60)
Solitude, however, does not breed solipsism in Wordsworth. For all the truth
there may be in Keats’s attribution of the ego-
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tistical sublime" to Wordsworth’s poetry, it should be noted that the
revisions of The Prelude indicate a careful modesty about all references to
himself. There are several cases of revisions in which he hides himself among
the many; for example, the substitution in one of his apostrophes to Coleridge
for himself as a Byronic solitary pupil by simply "one of many
school-fellows" (1805: 13. 317-19; 1850: 14. 332-34). Mary Burton counts
over 150 instances when Wordsworth expunged first-person pronouns to
decentralize the focus and sharpen it at the same time.22
Just as Wordsworth’s mind smoothes the entrance of the past into the present,
so the movement of the present into the future is smoothed by his sustaining
relationships with Dorothy and with Coleridge. As they grounded him emotionally
in the world, with the communio of love and the communicatio of friendship, they helped
to keep him from driving forward too hastily and too far into abstraction, just
as they also kept him from being carried upward. These terms refer us once
again to Binswanger, whose definition of authenticity refers to those heights
or depths attained only so far as the Dasein undergoes the arduous process of
choosing to grow into maturity.23Wordsworth’s acceptance of his
life-in-length is parallel to his rejection of the epiphany in the spots of
time. He has learned that knowledge is not that which we have (1805: 12. 436)
but knowing what we have learnt to know (1850: 14. 438). Truth arises from
discourse and through the adventure of living. This apophanic narrative stream
is always intuitively compared to a murmuring Derwent and the process whereby
his own life, as a stream, gradually eroded those "spots" protruding
like obstinate promontories. Thirty-five years have brought the special love
that is the transcendent power of the mind, an invisible feeding source that,
like some sacred Alph, originates with a natal murmur in a blind cavern (1850:
14. 88-96). At last, it provides a sustaining thought of human Being, Eternity,
God. Thus metaphor has become absorbed in a metonymy of self.
Wordsworth has effected the transformation that Wallace Stevens once suggested
as central to any such prelude to felicity (felicitas) in his poem on The Pure
Good of Theory. Having learned that he is constituted by and through time, just
as he will be destroyed by it, Wordsworth casts upon shadows and the beatings,
a poet’s mind, free from time, so that he may achieve maturity, so that "a
capable being may replace / Dark horse and walker walking rapidly."
22 The One Wordsworth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1942), pp. 119-26.
23 Binswanger, Being-in-the-World, p. 436. The autobiography shows
how "arbeitet unser Bewusstsein, mit dem Leben fertig zu werden."
Dilthey, Der Aufbau, p, 74.
24 The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens, (New York:
Random House, 1972), p. 265.
