Abstract
In this chapter, I bring the presentation of visionary critique (or paraphysics) motivated by the consideration of Kant and other philosophers in previous chapters to bear on the poetry of Shelley, and in turn Shelley’s poetry indicates routes for the extension of visionary critique beyond the bounds of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. I read Shelley antithetically against Harold Bloom’s essays on Shelley, showing that the limit Shelley’s poetry approaches in his last lyrics, and especially the fragment, “The Triumph of Life,” can no longer be handled by the rhetorical criticism Bloom practices. I offer an alternative, which I call locative poetics, which is the poetic analogue of the philosophical idea of visionary critique: it consists in a re-locating of poetics in a realm beyond rhetorical figuration. Such re-locating is an analogue of philosophical self-(re)positioning, and the two fuse together to point the way from visionary critique to a fuller development of the notion of paraphysics.
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Notes
- 1.
Among its many contributions, Budick’s work provides in particular an extended genealogy of and commentary on Section 49 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “On the Powers of the Mind Which Constitute Genius.” In this section Kant cultivates the notion of aesthetic idea, “and by an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it” (Kant 1987, 182). Kant’s notion of aesthetic idea is perhaps the closest analogue in his work to the idea of visionary design I have cultivated in this book, at least insofar as visionary design is understood in an aesthetic context. The connection to the parafinite is made clear when Kant remarks that in the case of a powerful aesthetic idea, the presentation of the imagination prompts “so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way” (Kant 1987, 183). Taken as a unity, we may indeed say that the aesthetic idea is an absolutely parafinite presentation of the relatively parafinite . It is here that Kant outlines the succession of associations which is the focal concrete example for Budick’s entire development of the notion of an, as I would say, parafinite succession, which Budick reconstructs along the lines: lightning bolts → claws of light against darkness → eagle and peacock → Jupiter and Juno → heaven’s king and queen → God’s creative presence in being. Budick concedes that “Kant would perhaps have considered it otiose, or inevitably enervating to his own and Milton’s intensity of impact, to detail how this multiplex representation works concretely” (Budick 2010, 298), but in any case I do not find it so. First of all, Budick’s reconstruction only indicates one possible trajectory, and so in no way contravenes Kant’s point that the function of the aesthetic idea is “to quicken the mind by opening up for it a view into an immense realm” (Kant 1987, 183–4). Secondly, and more importantly, the “endlessness” of the succession at issue is not contravened by the finite number of steps, for each transition is a “giant step” covering an immense conceptual field. If there is an inadequacy, it is not, I think, in Budick’s reconstruction, but in the limited potential for the Kantian idea to cover the range of what I have referred to as visionary design . Here, I think, we feel Kant straining against the traditional philosophical scheme governed by the distinction between intuitions, concepts and ideas.
- 2.
Closer to the mark is Donald Reiman’s discussion of Shelley’s synaesthetic imagery (Reiman 1965, 105–7). Shelley’s poetic language points to the limits of language at the metaphorical “boundary” between language and sense. “Shelley’s exploration of the limits of language is an aesthetic analogue to the humility that prevented him from dogmatizing on ontological matters, even about questions upon which he felt a psychological need for certainty, and synaesthetic imagery is often the vehicle of that exploration” (Reiman 1965, 107). Reiman rightly emphasizes Shelley’s deep affiliation with philosophical skepticism, an issue extensively considered by Earl Wasserman (Wasserman 1971).
- 3.
Compare Shelley, in The Revolt of Islam:
. . . Hate – that shapeless fiendly thing
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Of many names, all evil, some divine,
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Whom self-contempt arms with a mortal sting;
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Which, when the heart its snaky folds entwine
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Is wasted quite . . . (cited and discussed, Wasserman 1971, 110)
The folded snake is Amphisbaena , the fabled two-headed snake which moves in both directions, inward to self-contempt and outward to sadistic oppression. It is worth noting that Blake’s serpentine temple is linearly extending whereas Shelley’s snake is self-circularly enfolded. On Shelley’s folds, see below.
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- 4.
Epipsychidion 574–591 (Shelley 1977, 387–8). I follow, indeed intensify, Nathaniel Brown’s emphasis on the importance of dreams in Shelley, suggesting that Shelley recounts a dream throughout the poem (Brown 1979, esp. 125–32, drawing on Shelley’s fragment, “On Dreams”). Dreams are more important, and more global, in Shelley than is generally appreciated (most obviously in Alastor), and when properly understood more than counterbalance Keats ’ emphasis of sleep , as in Endymion. The respective emphases, however, are drastically different, and correspond roughly to the first two levels of paraphysics , “derangement” and “dislocation.” Frye recognizes in Keats’ imprisoning dream a “dislocation of time” (Frye 1968, 131), and in the interpenetrating world that corresponds to Shelley’s merging of rivers at the end of Epipsychidion, that the “‘World or Elemental space ’ would disappear ” (Frye 1968, 160–1). In a passage which Keats notes as crucial in a letter to his publisher, we find:
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Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
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Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
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A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
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Full alchemiz’d, and free of space . Behold
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The clear religion of heaven! (cited, Frye 1968, 162)
Frye summarizes Keats’ impulse powerfully in remarking that “Keats sees in poetry a power that can bring us into an interpenetrating world in which the word ‘farther’ ceases to mean anything ” (Frye 1968, 162–3). Dislocation is a dislocation, specifically, of the parafinite. This is a conception of power purified of extension, which in a way is to say: purified of purification. Thus Frye is right, in the end, to see Keats’ project as a “further stage” (beyond Shelley) in the development of romantic poetry. He further points out that after Endymion, Keats explored a “more Shelleyan cosmos,” in which “renewed powers rise from below” (Frye 1968, 144). The further contrast Frye goes on to draw between Keats and Eliot (Frye 1968, 163) is relevant as well.
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- 5.
Bloom’s insight is strongly connected to his discussion of “The Triumph of Life” several pages later, where he recognizes a “bitter eloquence and dramatic condensation” along with “a ruthless pruning of invention” (Bloom 1971, 112). See the discussion of this poem below.
- 6.
Bloom focuses on Biblical sources, but Curtius points to classical antecedents as well, specifically Parmenides ’ Car of the Muses. The allegorical chariot reaches a cultural height in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; in Alan of Lille it is constructed from the trivium and quadrivium along with the five senses and mounted by Phronesis, Ratio and Prudentia . See Curtius (1953, 120). For an instance of the allegorical chariot of virtues, see the inside cover of the hardbound edition of Fletcher (1964).
- 7.
I am indebted to Angus Fletcher for suggesting this distinction between pattern and system, with orbital system as privileged example, in conversation. Like the distinction between figure and locus, the distinction between pattern and system opens a route from the rhetorical to the visionary. On the combination of imagination and movement , see also Ammons (1993, 55–6), which I take to be the central statement of his fine, long poem, Garbage.
- 8.
- 9.
On the difference for Shelley between pure rays of the sun and sunlight diffused by the earth’s atmosphere , see Reiman (1965, 15 and 24).
- 10.
It is a text-book example of Bloom’s trope of kenosis in The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom 1973, 76–92), in this case Bloom emptying himself out before Shelley. As Shelley’s passage occurs in the Song of Apollo, which stands in adjunctive relation to the Song of Pan, it is perhaps worth noting that in this latter poem Apollo is “silent for love” on account of his envy of Pan’s “sweet pipings.” For both reasons we must entertain the possibility that Bloom’s compliment to Shelley is conclusively backhanded. Midas’ preference in Mary Shelley’s play, for which the two songs were composed, was for Pan’s “sprightly” song over Apollo’s “drowsy tune,” and this mirrored Mary’s own urging of Shelley to “a style that commanded popular fashion” and “the delineation of human passion,” finding Shelley “too fond of the theoretical and the ideal ” (cited, Wasserman 1971, 55).
On a more biographical note, we may hazard that this swerve is a function of Bloom’s early love of Shelley, the focus of his first book, since we find a similar swerve at the end of Bloom’s chapter on Samuel Johnson , “my hero since my boyhood,” in The Western Canon (Bloom 1994, 201–2).
- 11.
The agon of serpent and eagle already figures powerfully in Shelley’s Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude , lines 227ff (Shelley 1977, 76–7).
- 12.
It is grammatically possible to read ‘its snaky folds’ as referring to Hate, but semantically it makes little sense to attribute folds to something shapeless – though this is just what Leibniz will do, metaphorically, in his description of the continuum ! Nonetheless, the greater context bears out the referent. In any case, it is important to note the tension bordering on ambiguity of reference which Shelley’s reception and treatment of traditional figures , especially this one, so consistently implies.
- 13.
In Comus, Milton also uses the cognate term ‘pin-fold ’, which is used figuratively to refer to a place of confinement ; see Reiman (1965, 22).
- 14.
Wasserman juxtaposes mother-son and brother-sister in his reading of “Alastor” (Wasserman 1971, 24). Along the lines of my reading of Wasserman’s method below, we may see these dual forms of incest as exemplars of Shelley’s poetic “adjunction .”
- 15.
Fletcher (2004). Between Wasserman and Fletcher , Northrop Frye recognizes the importance of questions over answers in terms that are particularly relevant here, speaking of the way that an answer can block a question at another level. Like Wasserman and Fletcher, Frye too develops a solution in terms of the reader as hero, but his approach is typological, taking the example of Blake’s typology as North Star. See Frye 1982, xv, 196 (on questions) and 226 (“every text is the type of its own reading”). On the latter issue, see also Frye 1976, 157.
- 16.
- 17.
Shelley speaks of anatomies in this sense at line 500; Rousseau refers to the “ghastly dance” at line 540 (Shelley 1977, 469 and 470 respectively).
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Bassler, O.B. (2018). Shelley’s Vision. In: Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77291-2_6
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