Abstract
The discussion of Hegel’s objective idealism in Chapter 1 provides a context for reading Victorian poetry which shows how the poetry disrupts conventional assumptions about consciousness as a coherent and controlling unit. It also shows how anti-dualist thinking and post-structuralist ideas are already present in the nineteenth century, particularly the potential for recognising that the human subject does not maintain mastery over its meanings and its consciousness.1
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Notes
Friedrich Schlegel, from ‘Ideas’ (1800), No. 150, in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen M. Wheeler (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 59. Hereafter cited as Wheeler.
See Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1980): Romantic irony can appear ‘as two opposed voices or personae, or two contradictory ideas or themes, which the author carefully balances and refuses to synthesize or harmonize’ (p. 18); and Clyde de L. Ryals, Becoming Browning: the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, 1833–1846 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983): ‘It is the function of philosophical irony as [Schlegel] expounds it to permit an individual to hold the two contrary states of being and becoming in mind at the same time and to recognize that they cannot be harmonized’ (p. 5); Ryals’ excellent application of the concepts of Romantic irony to the early works of Browning contains provocative implications for the reading of Victorian poetry in general.
From the ‘Dialogue on Poetry’ (1799–1800), in Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park and London: the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 86.
See Gary J. Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (Yale University Press, 1985). Handwerk argues that what is central to Schlegel is not the humanity-nature or subject-object opposition, but rather a concern with communication and its consequent intersubjectivity. He agrees that Schlegel did start from the position of irony as heightened self-awareness on the model of the individual ego, but shows how Schlegel went further, ‘to analyze the dynamics of the transition between the subject and the other subjects that compose community’ (p. 5). In this reading, Schlegel’s ethical irony destabilises self-consciousness itself, adding as purpose ‘an intentional decentering of the subject that operates as an opening out to the other’ (pp. 42–3).
See, e.g., Janice L. Haney, ‘“Shadow-Hunting”: Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 17 (Summer 1978): ‘Schlegel’s irony is a version of that subjective idealism that offers triumph to the self (p. 313); and Paul Hamilton, ‘Romantic Irony and English Literary History,’ in The Romantic Heritage: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Karsten Engelberg (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1983): ‘Romantic irony can be provisionally defined as a self-awareness which is always in excess of any means chosen to express it’ (p. 14).
Lilian R. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 42.
See Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., Romantic Contraries: Freedom versus Destiny (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 159. Thorslev characterises all dialectical thinking in this way, claiming that for ‘the Romantic dialectician’ the ‘opposition alone is real’ (p. 68). The reason for not excluding Hegel from this blanket claim seems to be that Hegel is equated by Thorslev with the subjectivism that says ‘things have no reality apart from our knowledge of them, and the mind itself ultimately creates this knowledge which is the only reality’ (p. 71). As I have argued, Hegel’s writing refutes that form of subjectivist thinking as another crude dualism.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: the Athlone Press, 1981), p. 43. I am inclined to think that Hegel’s resolution of oppositions into a ‘third term’ is not as consistent or as frequent as Derrida and tradition suggests.
Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Dent, 1978).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York Vintage, 1974), pp. 298–9 (section 354); The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 285 (section 526). All italics here and elsewhere are Nietzsche’s.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Glyph, vol. 1 (1977), 181. Hereafter cited as SEC.
Ann Wordsworth, ‘“Communication Different”’, Browning Society Notes, vol. 13, no. 1 (n.d.), 4–18. This essay in BSN is part of a growing concern among critics with the importance in Victorian poetry of language as theme, the textualisation of experience, consciousness and the self as illusion: see also, Harold Bloom and Ann Wordsworth in Robert Browning, eds. Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings; E. Warwick Slinn, Browning and the Fictions of Identity (London: Macmillan, 1982); Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry; Timothy Peltason, ‘Supposed Confessions, Uttered Thoughts: The First-Person Singular in Tennyson’s Poetry’, Victorian Newsletter, no. 64 (1983), pp. 13–18; Tucker, ‘From Monomania to Monologue: “St Simeon Stylites” and the Rise of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 22 (Summer 1984), 121–37; Slinn, ‘Some Notes on Monologues as Speech Acts’, BSN, vol. 15, no. 11 (1985), 1–9. Clyde Ryals’book, Becoming Browning, in its use of Romantic irony and F. Schlegel’s dialectics as a context for reading Browning is also directly relevant.
Derrida, in The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972): ‘The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don’t destroy the subject; I situate it’ (p. 271).
In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 196–231. In this section of the discussion, references to this essay will be cited within the text by page number.
In the notes to his own translation of ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Jeffrey Mehlman observes that ‘Derrida presses in the direction of a theatre of writing’, in Yale French Studies, vol. 48 (1972), 73.
Walter Benn Michaels, ‘The Interpreter’s Self: Peirce on the Cartesian “Subject”’, Georgia Review, vol. 31 (1977), 401. The quotation from Peirce is cited on the same page in Michaels’ article. The role of interpretation within self-conception or self-understanding is receiving increased philosophical attention; see, for example, Anthony Paul Kerby in ‘The Adequacy of Self-Narration: A Hermeneutical Approach’, Philosophy and Literature, 12 (1988), 232–44, where he argues that ‘we must recognize interpretation as an integral part of the subject’s very being’ (233).
All quotations from ‘Two in the Campagna’ are taken from Browning: Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Richard D. Altick, ‘Lovers’ Finiteness: Browning’s “Two in the Campagna”’, PLL, vol. 3 (1967), 79.
‘The Lady of Shalott’, 152, my italics; cited from The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969).
The Lady becomes indeed Geoffrey Hartman’s ‘floating signifier’; see his chapter on ‘Psychoanalysis: The French Connection’, in Saving the Text (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 110. Hartman also makes the point about her attempt to place herself ‘in an unmediated relation to whatever “really” is’, adding that this wish ‘means a desire to be defined totally: marked or named once and for all, fixed in or by a word’ (p. 97). For further discussion of the semiotic possibilities of this poem, see Anne C. Colley, ‘The Quest for the “Nameless” in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 23 (1985), 369–78, and Gerhard Joseph, ‘The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 23 (1985), 403–12.
I take the point about the ambiguous curse from Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 108; Tucker also notes, echoing Hartman, that the Lady ‘confronts not the world, but the impossibility of her confronting the world’ (p. 114).
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Slinn, E.W. (1991). Consciousness as Writing. In: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10452-9_3
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