Abstract
This chapter argues that William Wordsworth’s sonnets “To Sleep” undermine the strict partitions of Cartesian dualism. First, I clarify some implications of the Cartesian distinction which privileges the mind over the body—particularly how in states of pain and tiredness Descartes regarded the body as obstructing the soul. Then I offer a close reading of the sonnets which is informed by Jane Bennett’s partial approval of Darwinian anthropomorphising of the nonhuman and Drew Leder’s distinction between the ecstatic and the recessive body. This close reading yields a lyrical phenomenology of the embodied mind, through which I argue that Wordsworth’s sonnets’ tonal range and varied assemblage of imagery reveal that consciousness depends upon a never entirely governable, multiple materiality.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Lee Scrivner in Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity describes how, in insomnia, the Cartesian cogito shows up as a faculty that can lose control over itself (2014, 39–41). He links the increasingly vexed discussions of the mind-body problem in the later nineteenth century—brought into focus by Nietzsche’s anti-Cartesian claim that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants” (40)—with the unwanted and uncontainable self-proliferation of thought which assails consciousness when sleep eludes it.
- 3.
Although unmentioned by both Bennett and Leder, the phenomenological treatment of the horror of insomnia owes much to the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas interprets insomnia as life’s revenge on Cartesian consciousness; in sleeplessness, life, as pure, elemental being, effects its own epoché and brackets out the self. Levinas argues that, in insomnia, the “fatality of irremissible being” overthrows individuated subjectivity and brings with this overthrow a terrible realisation: all being derives from the il y a (the “there is”—Levinas’s term for the pre-personal, elemental being shared by everything that “exists” whether living, animate, inert or dead). The being of individuated subjectivity is subsumed by the anonymity of the night (see Levinas 2001, 52–57). Insomnia—like nausea, fatigue, and indolence—is a condition of being in which the agentic power of consciousness is thwarted, as if mocked by a weight it cannot shift (see Levinas 2003, 66–68; Levinas 2001, 12–25 and Levinas 1987, 48–49). The experience of insomnia disturbs the foundations of the cogito envisaged as agentic consciousness since, in sleeplessness, the conscious will finds itself facing a realm in which nothing can be taken up. Consciousness, having fallen into a condition of being that is beyond its command, finds itself baffled by a feeling of disintegrating torment.
- 4.
This emphasis on sleep’s human-nonhuman materiality distinguishes my reading of the sonnets from Sara Guyer’s, Mary Jacobus’s and Eluned Summers-Bremner’s. Guyer argues that Wordsworth’s use of apostrophe and prosopopoeia makes possible an ethical rhetoric of vigilant wakefulness. Jacobus emphasises the sonnets’ epitaphic qualities which she associates with a wider Wordsworthian concern with “being held”. Summers-Bremner’s reading complements mine more readily as she argues that the speaker’s inability to “bend nature to his will” is both a comfort and a source of insomnia. See Guyer (2007, 141–159), Jacobus (2012, 114–127) and Summers-Bremner (2008, 88–90).
- 5.
Eluned Summers-Bremner’s final claim in her discussion of Wordsworth’s sleep sonnets is perfectly companionable with my conclusion. She writes: “Our need for sleep could be seen as the means by which we belong to nature, because it is the one time when we are not separated from what lies beyond consciousness by consciousness” (2008, 90).
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Dodd, N. (2019). Materiality, the Recessive Body and Wordsworth’s Sonnets “To Sleep”. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_3
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