Chimes at Midnight: Harold Bloom's Literary Memoir

   Threaded through with reflections on his life and many friends, Harold Bloom's posthumous volume of criticism, Take Arms Against A Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death (2020), is a summary account of the poets that obsessed him for almost eighty years, since he began reading through the New York Public Library at the age of ten. It is, however, far more. It is a vivid dramatization of one of his chief principles as a critic: self-revision. Well beyond wrestling with prior writers, wrestling with one’s earlier self, says Bloom, is the defining factor in every writer’s life because every writer takes herself--he began using the feminine pronoun as generic many years ago--as her own most important precursor. Here Bloom’s pas de deux is a dance with his own past, a past with which he converses by splitting himself in two, repeating himself on the one hand--the poets that consume him remain the same canonical figures from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens--while, on the other, shifting their positions in his mind because their roles change in his changing estimation of literary history. The shifts open a dialogue between the present and what has come before. Troubled by age and subject to its cognitive vicissitudes, Bloom harnesses these new affections and disaffections to a careful dramatic strategy festooned by autobiography and achieving its desired end with stunning effect: making what is old young again by changing his mind, giving his last book a fresh, sharp ring as the bell tolls its evensong. Self-revision is “metalepsis” (275), looking backward from the future in a way that alters the past. It is the cornerstone of Bloom’s notion of literary influence, which is, as he reminds us, “dialectical” (240). Bloom is not, of course, original here. It is the great secret of his success. He borrows the notion of both metalepsis and its effects from his arch-enemy, T.S. Eliot, in this familiar passage from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919): 

        No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is            the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must         set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not            merely, historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one                sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously            to all the works of art which preceded it. 

    There is no clearer statement of Bloom’s principles as a critic, so much so that this passage is an example of what it describes. It is Bloom talking now, not Eliot, and reveals the mechanism at work in Bloom’s notion of influence: how, by virtue of what Freud only the year before Eliot’s essay called deferred action, the future casts new light over the past and revises it. Eliot refines Bloom—or, rather, Bloom refines Eliot—more and more as the famous passage concludes: 

         The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the                     introduction of the new (the really new) work among them. The existing order is complete before          the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing                 order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of          art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever          has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it                 preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the          past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. 

    This is why the one sustaining feature of Bloom’s stance throughout his career-the indebtedness to Eliot and the anxiety that accompanies it--remains unchanged. It falls across his work like the melancholic shadow that it is. Bloom has stolen what the thunder said from the poet of The Waste Land. This is the terrible fact that requires endless repression. It exhausts him. It is the true source of his rapturous depression. As Freud reminds us, the melancholic shadow derives from an unconscious identification that will not go away no matter how unhappy it makes the sufferer: “I tend,” says Bloom, “to struggle against being moved by Eliot, having battled all my life against his influence in our decaying academies” (26). That influence is the influence on Bloom himself, for whom clearing away Eliot is the prime directive. As a critic, says Bloom, “Eliot surpasses himself in violent dogmatism” (12). As a poet, the situation is much worse. Eliot’s influence as a poet is not dogmatic but genuine. It directs the history of modern and contemporary poetry down to the present day: “Turn Eliot’s verse every which way and its idiosyncratic development of late Romanticism is palpable” (13). The hatred of Eliot is not a strategy. It is real. 

    What Bloom revises in his conversation with himself are two crucial aspects of his work, the one early, from his days as a Romantic specialist, the other later, when his preoccupation with Shakespeare comes to dominate his thinking. The first is his estimation of Keats; the second is Shakespeare’s relation to Milton. It is this latter that takes center stage, as it were. The change in the status of Keats follows from it. 

    The chief contribution of Bloom’s study of Shakespeare (1998) that splits his career in two is the connection it draws between Shakespeare and English literature as a whole. It rests on Milton’s indebtedness to Shakespeare in Paradise Lost, a connection that no critic before Bloom has had either the wisdom or the temerity to draw in so coherent a way. “I have,” says Bloom, “been unable to find any lucid and compelling account of the Shakespearean shadow that falls across all of Milton’s poetry, and in particular darkens Paradise Lost. This has been for me a lifelong obsession” (39). Bloom elucidates it for the first time in his book on Shakespeare by finding Satan’s origins in Iago. Iago, argues Bloom, is Satan’s chief literary progenitor. In the new book, this relation changes. The relation is no longer one between Satan and Iago. It is now one between Satan and Hamlet. It is a welcome step forward. Still preserving the new and salutary link between Shakespeare and the later tradition of English poetry that has Milton at its head as the progenitor of English Romanticism, it is nonetheless a far richer relation between Shakespeare and Milton because Hamlet is a far richer figure than Iago and a far more compelling model of mind with which to grant Satan a tutor. No wonder a line from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy gives the new book its title. The change from Iago to Hamlet begins in Bloom’s chapter “Milton’s Hamlet” in The Anatomy of Influence (2011). It is the centerpiece of the self-revision regarding Shakespeare and Milton here. Before, says Bloom, “I recall once writing”--the avuncularity is disarming--”that Milton’s Satan was indebted to Iago for his sense of injured merit” (58). Now he is indebted to Hamlet for his “relentless self-questioning” (49). Hamlet’s new role also serves as an emblem for Bloom’s own self-defining principle, the principle of endless self-revision. Milton’s Satan is no longer the disciple of Iago. He is “a version of Hamlet” (6). 

    This change adds both dignity and youth to Satan, the former something Satan does not require, the latter something he does. This is a reflection of Bloom’s own need—it is youth he seeks now. It is also why the self-revision regarding Keats is forthcoming only later in the book. It is a function of the substitution of Hamlet for Iago as a model for Satan. This newly found interest in Keats was never before one of Bloom’s obsessions. It is the subject of not one but two chapters here. Like Hamlet, Keats is the soul of youthfulness, its emblem not only in English poetry but in English culture at large, the prototype of Romantic affection through disaffection, of the delicacy of despair and the brim of youth heightened by its own self-regarding loss in a deft and elegant orgy of narcissistic self-display. What more than a love for one’s own body defines youth, and youth at its moment of sexual self-discovery, even to the point of revisiting the possibility of gender acquisition and expanding its potential to the point of pansexuality? Keats’s early death and the degeneration of his young body focus for Bloom his twin preoccupations: his nostalgia for youth and his knowledge of oncoming death. They come together in Keats. Bloom requires a screen to mask this, of course, and he does so by claiming that Keats is more Shakespearean than Miltonic. “Keats Shakespeareanizes Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth” (104) all alike. This may be a dubious claim to make about so Miltonic a poet as Keats--Bloom admits as much by acknowledging how Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion derives from the invocations in Paradise Lost. But it does not deter him from the wider purpose it serves. 

    Bloom finds more than youth in his new enthusiasm for Keats. Keats—and Bloom—also find a solution to the same problem that Shakespeare solves. Keats’s identity with Shakespeare is without critical duplicity because it rests on a sound critical premise: “Setting aside Shakespeare,” says Bloom, “Keats is the first major English poet free of religion” (316). Here the role the new estimation of Keats and Shakespeare both play in Bloom’s self-revisionism becomes entirely clear. “The relation of poetry to belief has vexed me for too many decades” (615), he writes. His Orthodox upbringing, his critical flirtations over the years with the Hebrew Bible, with Gnosticism, with Kabbalah, even with the Christian Bible--all were witness to this vexation. Now, the new estimation of Shakespeare provides the ground for the new solace to be found in Keats at this late hour. “For me,” says Bloom now, “Shakespeare has replaced God” (110). With it comes the reason a new feeling for Keats.is possible. Keats’s Shakespeareanism, however arguable critically, is essential to Bloom experientially: Keats is, like Shakespeare, an entirely physical, not metaphysical, poet. “Keats is completely physical in a physical world” (297). Like Shakespeare, his divinity--both his sense of it and his own—is concrete. It lies with the words to be found on the page. One can see the invocation of the famous fragment coming before Bloom even quotes it: 

            This living hand, now warm and capable 

            Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold 

            And in the icy silence of the tomb, 

            So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights 

            That thou would[st] wish thine own heart dry of blood 

            So in my veins red life might stream again, 

            And thou be conscience-calm’d--see here it is—  I hold it towards you. (332) 

    Hence, too, the durability of Stevens in the Bloom canon. Despite the numerous changes in Bloom’s self-revisions, the enthusiasm for Stevens not only remains. It grows steadier because it has a sharper focus. While Bloom retains his enthusiasm for Blake, Yeats, and Crane, its reasons remain as puzzling as ever; no amount of elucidation can explain it, now or in the past. But with Stevens, the change in the estimation of Shakespeare and, even more, of Keats draws the appreciation in finer lines because they have clearer reasons behind them. Like Whitman, though in a lower key, Stevens is not simply a poet of daily life, but also a poet entirely free of religion. No poet is more adequate to Whitman’s requirement that “Creeds and schools” be held “in abeyance.” “I am happy,” says Bloom, “to join Stevens,” as he does Whitman, “in an air clear of everything” (443). 

    Bloom’s secularism also has a surprising collateral effect. His presumable conservatism as a critic masks a political radicalism on a par with Milton’s own. Reminding his reader that Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in jail, he remarks that “Milton still speaks,” in an unlikely allusion to Fanon, “for the wretched of the earth” (154). Nor is his influence on feminism to be underestimated, as his disciples Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) proved many years ago. The anxiety of influence is nothing at bottom but a political notion, its dialectic perhaps even more Marxist than Freudian, and a reflection of Bloom’s roots as a first-generation American who as a child spoke Yiddish at home and absorbed the labor-movement atmosphere of Jewish New York in the 1930s. Even his sexual politics were as a rule always of a welcoming kind socially, leading him here to celebrate outright Whitman as “pansexual” and Lawrence as “omnisexual” (382, 468). 

    Bloom’s appreciation of Lawrence, however, falls short of political radicalism because it requires a view of death that he cannot abide. No wonder Bloom has little to say about Lawrence here other than noting the contrast he provides with Eliot in a chapter devoted to Yeats and Lawrence. Yeats, alas, is always the focus of the conversation. This is unfortunate--one wants to know whether Bloom’s view of Lawrence, too, has undergone revision. The young Bloom was a champion of Lawrence’s verse at a time when R.P. Blackmur’s dismissal of Lawrence’s poems as primitive guided academic opinion. Bloom, by contrast, distinguished the primitive from the bardic; Lawrence the poet was different from Eliot because the craft was invisible, prophetic and unsummoned rather than mannered and ostentatious. Bloom reprises that judgment here in a single key remark about Eliot’s estimation of Lawrence: “What persuaded Eliot that anything about Lawrence was unsophisticated, I cannot imagine” (471).

     Bloom cannot elaborate the reasons for Lawrence’s sophistication because they are at odds with what he wishes to imagine now about life and death. Lawrence is sophisticated because he is the bard of a younger man with time on his side. Lawrence rhapsodically destabilizes the voice of the poetic speaker, dissolving the speaker into the landscape he beholds.The egotistical sublime, as Keats called the cool ecstasis of Wordsworth’s speaker, becomes in Lawrence an ecological sublime. This is Lawrence’s environmentalism--a political radicalism that Bloom cannot endorse. The poet slips into the landscape, finding no privilege in being human. This self-burial will not do as Bloom approaches the midnight hour. The literary judgment may remain the same, but its existential valuation does not. It is too costly an appreciation. 

    Bloom’s final self-revisions don’t so much provide wisdom, as a middle-aged Bloom believed literature should do when he thought of himself, as he put it then, as “the Yiddische Dr. Johnson.” They provide youth. The shift in identifying Satan with Hamlet and Romanticism with Keats are the fresh self-identifications that allow Bloom a new, twin persona that combines wish and reality, memory and desire: Hamlet, the doomed undergraduate; Keats, the young poet shadowed by his imminent demise. The new heroes are dialectical self-portraits of earliness and lateness in perfect equipoise, they allow the aged Bloom, as he liked to call himself, the imagination of rebirth while haunted, as he always was, by the reality of death. 

    The identification with Keats and Hamlet is also what provides Bloom his long-sought victory over Eliot. For Eliot, Hamlet fails as a play because Hamlet as a character feels “in excess,” as Eliot puts it, of what facts the play presents, or fails to present, to Hamlet’s imagination. It provides, in the famous formulation, no “objective correlative” for them [Note 3: “Hamlet and His Problems,” Selected Essays, p,145]. There is no proof for his mother’s presumable complicity in murdering his father. Her twice cuckolding him as a son--this is why Ernest Jones suggested the Oedipus complex has its origins for Freud in Shakespeare rather than in Sophocles—is, for Eliot, insufficient. It is no wonder that Hamlet thinks too much about too little. All mothers cuckold their sons, though not, to be sure, twice over and by also so usurping the son as to murder the father in the process. As a Freudian, Bloom finds in the play what Eliot cannot--the reason for Hamlet’s endless reflectiveness. Like Hamlet, Bloom thinks too much. Unlike Hamlet, Eliot thinks too little. Eliot cannot gain access to his own “idea of order” in life or in literature in order to reorder it. Therein lies Bloom’s triumph thanks to a durable surfeit of lust and anxiety. Bloom thereby deconstructs the difference between thought and feeling, too—Eliot’s equally famous “dissociation of sensibility” [Note 4: “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) Selected Essays, p. 288)]—allowing him to shuffle the cards of tradition at will. 

    For all his learning and the formidable buzzing of allusion that makes his mind a cave of verbal echoes—“I should,” he says, “blame myself for piling up authorities” (607)—Bloom remains, as he insisted, an experiential critic. All criticism, he said, is autobiographical, and nothing in his work proves it more than this last testament to his faith in himself and his good will toward others. His deceptions are in the service of his critical art alone. Unlike Eliot’s, no ill will or dogmatism pervades it. Even his Freudianism is benign rather than resigned, a paean to his undiminished wish for earliness--for youth and gaiety--that his preoccupation with belatedness belies. He knew that and makes it explicit here. 

D.H. Lawrence Review, 2020. Volume 45:1 & 2

Books

'Capital' as Literature: Marx Against Himself. New York and London: Routledge, 2026. eBook, 2026.

Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf. New York and London: Routledge, 2022. eBook, 2022.

Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with

Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. eBook, 2011.

The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan. Oxford: Blackwell Manifestos, 2010. eBook, 2010. Portuguese translation, 2015 (Tinta Negra).

The Literary Freud. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. eBook, 2013.

The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. eBook, 1998.

The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25. Co-ed. with Walter Kendrick. With Introduction, Epilogue, and Appendices. New York: Basic Books, 1985; London: Chatto & Windus, 1986. Paperback, 1990 (Norton); French translation,1990 (Presses Universitaires de France); German translation,1995 (Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse).

Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981. eBook, 2014 (International Psychotherapy Institute).

The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

J. Hillis Miller's All Souls' Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies

Specificity

    Foucault’s contribution to the reading of literature is a double one. His use of tropological inventories to show how rhetorical patterns structure texts through difference provides the reading of prose—both fiction and, as I will show with Melanie Klein and with Freud later on, non-fiction—a specificity of method ordinarily limited to poetry. But it also does more than that. It provides a way of finding history in texts through the avenue of form. This is what is so perplexing about the New Historicism’s appeal to Foucault as an antidote to deconstruction. Nowhere is this misuse of Foucault more prevalent than it is in the study of Victorian fiction, and nowhere is it more amusing. Victorian novels are, as I will show, splendid witness to the historicism implicit in deconstructive reading for a simple reason. Tropological inventories of novels include more often than not the trope of texts. Textuality is central to fiction, not because it makes fiction reflexive, but because it heightens its realism. Texts are not only a metaphor in novels. They are also a plain element in the concrete social worlds that novels represent. J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructive reading of Victorian fiction points out this doubleness with singular efficiency. The anguished New Historicist reaction to it reveals the truth of what it denies by unconsciously appropriating its key insights.

    “Bleak House,” writes Miller in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Dickens’s 1853 novel, “is a document about the interpretation of documents” (1971, 11). What does Miller’s easy, avuncular insight reveal? Text and world are no longer copy and original. Narration and story, récit and histoire are one and the same. Why? Because the world itself is made up of languages. Language, by definition, is part of the world rather than its dim and fugitive reflection.

    The swell of textuality that makes the unlikely reflexiveness of Dickens’s novels a template for Victorian fiction is not limited to Dickens alone. Casaubon’s fruitless search for the “key to all mythologies” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is, as Miller points out (1987), another locus classicus for the foregrounding of textuality in Victorian writing. The metaphor of reading makes the personal and the hermeneutical equivalent by virtue of the common activity of interpretation that they share. Casaubon’s brutality as a husband and as a scholar who falls short of nuance in both spheres of life is Victorian fiction’s most persuasive instance of what makes rudeness in one aspect of behavior an index of cruelty in the other. Dorothea is victim in love to what makes Casaubon’s intellectual project victim to a kin indecency. Casaubon’s failure as an interpreter lies in his lack of fluency as a reader. Despite the theological subject of The Key to All Mythologies, the work of the Higher Criticism is unavailable to him because he cannot read German. It leads to his fatal universalism as an interpreter. It also leads to his failure as a husband. He cannot read Dorothea either, whose attraction to him is based on an interest in his work whose details he will not share with her. It is no surprise that her interest in architectural renovation strikes no answering chord in him. Renovation, whether intellectual or personal, is the interpretative impulse whose absence on his part dooms his work and their marriage even before the failure of his heart dooms them both.

    Miller’s signature insight also allows one to see that Henry James’s indebtedness to Eliot proceeds from this starting point (2005). Dr. Sloper’s inability to understand his daughter’s desires in Washington Square (1880) is, like Casaubon’s inability to understand Dorothea, an inability to interpret as she does. James’s concern with the clash of the social codes of Americans and Europeans in Daisy Miller (1879) or “An International Episode” (1879) is also one that focuses on their lack of a common code of reading that underwrites their inability to understand one another. This is also what links the early, social James with the later, psychological James. Miller’s reading of James as a whole regards both personal and social interaction as a series of speech acts that move and persuade one’s thoughts and emotions. Its precondition is the notion that the psyche is a text. Here Miller’s unexpected appreciation of Steven Marcus’s edition of Freud’s letters to Fliess (1977) comes into focus as entirely logical. The unconscious, too, is, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s phrase, structured like a language.

Dickens en abyme

    It is customary to assign the source of Miller’s reading of Bleak House to his shift from the early influence of Georges Poulet to the later influence of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. The deconstructive Miller, however, is already implicit in the phenomenological Miller of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958). Not only that. To read Miller’s early book on Dickens in the light of his later reading of Bleak House is to be doubly surprised. The familiar tradition of complaint that Miller is not a historical critic of Dickens is misconceived. Not only is his phenomenological approach already structural; his presumable formalism is also historical. How does the identity of récit and histoire lead to a historical approach to fiction? One customarily regards seeing narration and story as doubles as an infinite regress or mise en abyme—as two likenesses reduplicating one another forever, forsaking any referential function they may have and becoming endless, reflexive copies of themselves. Like Warhol’s lithographs of historical figures such as Mao or Marilyn Monroe, historicity is presumably emptied out at the moment of its evocation. Far from being a retreat into the formal, however, the mise en abyme or infinite regress is actually an opening onto history. No falling away into a mysticism of textuality, it is an entrance into textuality as the archive. Foucault (1966, 1969) before the fact rather than Blanchot after the fact (1955), Miller’s archive is the field of history in all its fugitive concreteness, the vortex of all the signs and their tokens left behind in the wake of time in its flight. Both specific and endlessly ungraspable, it is a reconceived resource for the critic and historian rather than a dead end.

    While Dickens’s fiction may seem to be a “self-contained entity” (1958, viii), says Miller, “it is” actually “a better clue than any biographical data to the writer’s intimate relation to the material world” (1958, ix). “A thousand paths radiate from the same center” (1958, 14). Pickwick Papers (1837), the entrance to Dickens’s world chronologically, is “a swarming” and “simultaneous plurality” of “centers” (1958, 13). Bleak House, later in Dickens’s career, is the ripe fruit of this early plant, a novel that adduces plural “perspectives from different viewpoints of a condition of reality too complex to be seen from any one perspective” (1958, 163). The doubling of récit and histoire in the novel is manifest, but it is in the service of discovering an archive, not a series of empty forms: “Characters,” chief among them the detective Mr. Bucket, “try to discover in the world an intelligible order” (1958, 167). Each character, Esther Summerson included, tries “to put together the fragments of the world into a coherent whole” (1958, 170). “The real detective” is “the narrator himself, attempting … to discover the laws of the world he sees” (1958, 176). Jarndyce and Jarndyce is no formal model; it is a profoundly concrete one. Although it will “never end”—indeed, “it is the permanent condition of life in Bleak House”—the “endless case … becomes a symbol in the novel of what it is to be in the world at all” (1958, 196). It is the very picture of the archive because it accounts for its complexity in terms of overdetermination, not closure: “The world of Bleak House,” says Miller, “is a vast interlocking system in which any change or action in one place will have a corresponding and reciprocal effect on any other place” (1958, 206). Hardly a phenomenological or formalist reduction, Miller’s reading employs the resources of both methods to produce something beyond them both: a model of fiction as a metatext that presents its own world as a model for discovering its plural relationships to the very real historical archives that prompt its production. The truth of this claim is played out in the subsequent history of Victorian criticism as it both accepts Miller’s influence and wrestles with the anxiety it provokes.

Influence and Anxiety in Victorian Studies

    Influence, as Harold Bloom reminds us, has a rocky history. It is marked not only by gratitude, but by quarrels that are not quarrels at all. They are the symptoms of indebtedness that provoke anxiety rather than gratitude. The movement of Victorian studies in fiction in the decades subsequent to Miller’s reading of Dickens reveals both. It also reveals how prescient Miller’s earliest work on Dickens is not only in relation to his later, deconstructive handling of Dickens in the infamous introduction to Bleak House. It also shows how much both kinds of readings enable the historicism that presumably comes to displace deconstruction.

    George Eliot is not the only major Victorian novelist who is part of the holistic paradigm for reading that Miller finds in Dickens. Walter Kendrick’s definitive study of Anthony Trollope, The Novel-Machine (1980), reveals an equivalent identity of textuality and manners in a writer presumably immune from such reflexivity. For Kendrick, a formalist approach leads to a formalist conclusion, or so it seems. Trollope’s conception of himself as a writer in his autobiography is that of a machine. He conceives of himself as an engine of production not unlike the world of industrial capitalism whose wealth and manners he represents, a world with which his writing is in point of fact identical as a project and an activity. Realism, according to Kendrick, has a surprising and unexpected precondition: “Writing,” he says, is “prior to the representation of reality,” not the other way around (1980, 3). Writing is primary, reality is secondary. Writing does not represent; it “transmits” (1980, 4). Kendrick appears to verify the notion that Miller’s formalism begets more formalism. But, as with Miller himself, Kendrick’s formalism contains a surprise. It is really an implicitly historical assessment of Trollope based on a theory of writing whose referential function derives from the psychological forms that reader and writer alike share at the level of their unconscious assumptions about Victorian life.

    Trollope’s novels do not therefore copy life. Their referentiality comes from elsewhere. They come from what Kendrick calls “conceptions” (1980, 8)—from an archive of ideas in Trollope’s mind. They are located in the novelist’s imagination and in the minds of Trollope’s readers. They meet in a field common to them both—an archive of assumption based on a knowledge of Victorian habits of mind. The Archdeacon Grantly in The Warden (1855), for example, is not a copy of anything real, but the result of Trollope’s own “consciousness” (1980, 19). The imitation is simultaneously reflexive and realistic. The imagination copies, as it were, itself. “Two things become identical”—the image and its representation—“without losing their difference” (1980, 20). “The result is duplication without imitation” (1980, 23). Trollope neither recollects nor imitates. Rather, he “brings his two halves”—half Trollope the writer, half Trollope his own reader—“by letting one sympathize with the other” (1980, 23). The novel exists in its prior conception and in its later reading. What is represented exists nowhere but in this relation. Writer and reader comingle in the archive that they both share. Novels convey reality precisely because they do not. Because life for Trollope is the life almost exclusively of the drawing room, its set of conceptions is extraordinarily strict and delimited. No wonder Lizzy Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) measures her own being in a fanciful relation to Shelley and to Byron (1980, 66). “The world is structured just as the mind is” (1980, 86), not as a merely psychological principle but as a representational one. “The world and the minds in it speak the same language” (1980, 87). “The Trollopian mind is a sort of internal debating society,” concludes Kendrick, “containing an audience and two speakers who compete for the reader’s attention” (1980, 87). Like Miller’s conception of the world of Dickens, “the structure of any particular novel is unimportant by comparison with the total structure to which each novel contributes a part” (1980, 87). Kendrick privileges He Knew He Was Right (1869) because it is a departure for Trollope. Its singularity exposes the methodical regularity of his other books because Louis Trevelyan’s madness exposes the single real danger to the novel-machine: “the boundless proliferation of signs that the novel is designed to contain and subjugate” (1980, 131). Here the threat of textuality to express itself and overwhelm the realist illusion reveals its endemic presence in the repression to which it is characteristically subject in Trollope’s other novels. Because madness is a proliferation of signs or “conceptions,” the result is the potential exposure of the endless textuality that Trollope ordinarily makes disappear. In this way, Trollope’s realism is always based on the textuality whose control is its repressed and preponderant condition.

    Even more explicit in showing the identity of world and texts is D.A. Miller’s study of Victorian fiction, The Novel and the Police (1988). While employing Foucault’s vocabulary from Discipline and Punish (1975) as a smokescreen, Miller the Younger is actually using Miller the Elder’s approach to Victorian writing. It is not surprising that he takes Miller the Elder’s reading of Bleak House as his polemical target. Miller the Elder’s view of the novel as “an interminable proliferation of signs” is “decisive” (1988, 67), but this “identification of form and content” (1988, 84) is insufficient to account for the novel’s wider activity. “The practices of the world” exceed “the practices of representing it” (1988, 84), particularly the mise en abyme of textuality into which novel and world alike are thrown by the insistence upon their isomorphism or shared technical structure. “Differentiating” the two spheres is required (1988, 84). Among the first of the New Historicist critics to employ Foucault’s use of Bentham’s Panopticon to explain narration in fiction, Miller the Younger exploits it to great effect. The Panopticon—the central tower in a prison occupied by a guard whose surveillance of the prisoners cannot be seen by them—is a screen onto which characters and reader, like Bentham’s prisoners, project their own fears and anxieties. This exposes the Victorian novel’s famed morality for what it is: a system of social tyranny and a fiction. Text and world are not the same. The world may employ textual practices—the control of society through duplicitous fictions—but they are not identical with narrative textuality. Narrative textuality is presumably unbiased, mimetic rather than tendentious, transparent rather than persuasive. Textuality and the social uses of representation may be similar, but they are also distinct.

    Miller the Younger gives us Wilkie Collins rather than Dickens to make his point. Far from identifying récit and histoire, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868 ) separates “the relevant signifiers from the much larger number of irrelevant ones” (1988, 33). Not everything counts, even if it requires measuring the difference between one signifier and another to do so. Sergeant Cuff, the official detective, knows this: “I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet” (1988, 35). Cuff fails because the novel’s strategies reach beyond the goals of detection—to the pursuit of a plot distinct from narration. There is no isomorphism between them. Textuality has as its project the discovery of an end to interpretation even though its real effect is to produce the proliferation of interpretation. Miller the Younger’s distinction is no distinction at all. Instead, it leads, ironically, to an identity between the Panopticon and the novel’s own narrative method—the very identity it presumably rejects.

    The exclusion of the official police in The Moonstone introduces policing of a different order in the margins of the text. The official police become the unofficial police to be found in the psyche of the characters and in the novel’s own narrative method, one which introduces unofficial policing in the reader. “The Moonstone dismisses the police altogether,” says Miller, “and the mysterious crime is worked to a solution by a power that no one has charge of”: the power of “gossip and domestic familiarity,” which themselves produce the effect of surveillance (1988, 49). Surveillance now occurs in “closed clubs and houses … . The intention to detect is visible only at a microscopic level,” not at a manifestly institutional one (1988, 49). The result is the creation of a new kind of institutional authority, one which, like the Panopticon, is everywhere and nowhere: a social authority produced by the effects of Collins’s writing. Here narration and story are redoubled in a way that may exceed isomorphism, but which requires it in order for it to be overcome. This is how The Moonstone satisfies “a double exigency: how to keep the everyday world entirely outside a network of police power and yet at the same time to preserve the effects of such power within it” (1988, 50).

    The same can be said of the novel itself. Its textual strategies both identify and distinguish between the two because, like the world it represents, it is also a Panopticon. Nor is the novel, as Miller the Younger claims, a “monological” text in Bahktin’s sense (1988, 54). On the contrary, because of “discontinuities and incoherencies” (1988, 56)—emblems of the blind alleys down which signifying chains of different authority or dialects may lead—the novel is, by definition, resolutely dialogical. Otherwise, the novel’s buckshot proliferation of anxieties and the fears that prompt them would be impossible to create in either the novel’s characters or in its reader. It creates them in order to control them both. Panoptical authority, by definition, exists everywhere and nowhere. Its effectiveness derives from the presence of its absence. Foucault’s Benthamite device is not an empirical one but a psychological one. Its power comes not from the guard’s actual surveillance of those incarcerated—whether or not there is even a guard on duty in the central tower is always an open question—but from the belief that he is. Surveillance is an effect of the Panopticon’s structure, not its cause. The same may be said of the role of the omniscient Victorian narrator, everywhere and nowhere at once. The narrator is an effect in which the reader believes, calculated by the text rather than by its speaker. Text and speaker are analogous to Panopticon and guard. The former creates the illusion of the latter. Their relationship may be distinct but, when all is said and done, it is also equivalent.

    This is not simply the structure of Victorian narration. It is also the story Victorian fiction tells, again and again. While presumably differing from Miller the Elder’s notion of narration and story, Miller the Younger reconstitutes it by means of its rejection. Miller the Younger’s anxiety of influencer redoubles the structure of authority that he finds at work in Collins. Miller the Elder’s authority returns as a repressed. Miller the Elder’s authority functions the way authority functions in The Moonstone. The strategic departure of the official police has as its ironic result the return of authority in a secret way that expands rather than inhibits its effects.

    D.A. Miller’s early New Historicism prefigures the far more thoroughgoing materialism of later studies of the Victorian novel such as Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things (2006). It is a fine example of both the difference from Miller the Elder’s pioneering work and its repressed continuity with it. Like D.A. Miller’s, Freedgood’s enabling rejection of Miller the Elder returns her to its theoretical assumptions. Like Miller the Younger, she, too, begins by claiming to move beyond the formalism of Miller the Elder, casting aside his reading of Dickens in order to do so (2006, 16–17). It allows her to return, consciously or not, to a heightened recapitulation of his enabling premise that texts are about the interpretation of texts. For Freedgood, a material approach leads to a formal one. Absorbing the influence of the New Historicism along with the influence of a reflexive reading of fiction, Freedgood’s focus on “things” shows how effective a materialist supplement to Miller the Elder’s approach can be. The most microscopic details of novelistic representation are mirrors, not of an object-world, but of an object-world that is itself a world of texts and representations. They disclose their historicity because they are parts of a discursive chain that reveals the endless signatures of their productive mechanisms, particularly the production of material goods. “Victorian novels’ penchant for the representation of the emblematic hodgepodge” of objects (2006, 6), she writes, reveals an “overdetermined material” history (2006, 5) that links the political, social, and mercantile in “a grammar of meaning” available to the attentive reader (2006, 6). This reader becomes a historical reader because this reader has already learned to become a formal reader trained in the belief that “documents” are “documents about the interpretation of documents.” A heightened formalism, as Roland Barthes once proposed, returns us to history in a fresh and vivid way.

    Like D.A. Miller’s, Freedgood’s argument is a clearer and more extraordinary one than her polemical assertions might lead one to believe. “Cultural knowledge is stored in a variety of institutional forms,” including “the word” (2006, 23). “The commodity is both a material object and a trope” (2006, 27). It is symbolic because it is real and real because it is symbolic. This kind of formalism produces “an interpretative open end of dizzying potential” (2006, 14) that allows the winds of real history to fill the novel with fresh life and lead to a new encounter with the real.

    The real, of course, is implicitly redefined in the process. It is the archive to which Miller the Elder is led in his early study of Dickens. Objects in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) are archives of their real histories of production, storehouses of meaning available precisely because they are texts to be interpreted. Freedgood’s particular focus is the “Negro-head tobacco” that Magwich smokes in Great Expectations, an object that is “a very particular kind of memorial” because it contains the history of both aboriginal genocide in Australia and imperial consumerism as a whole (2006, 83). The London press featured mass coverage of the atrocities in Australia alongside advertisements for products whose manufacture depended on the resources of colonialism whose protection depended on the violence of British military practice.

    Negro-head tobacco is, writes Freedgood, “a kind of unsupervised metonymic archive: a nearly infinite catalogue of compressed references to social facts” (2006, 84). The well-known and well-documented awareness in contemporary Victorian England of this history is one that the text of the novel assumes on the part of its reader. “It was part of,” says Freedgood, “the ‘hubbub’ of social discourse to which Dickens listened” (2006, 86). Freedgood’s New Historicism is the direct result of her close formalist reading, not a reaction to close reading but its best effect. Once again, Miller the Elder’s text within a text becomes the occasion for New Historicist specificity—precisely that which it presumably forecloses. What we today call “brands” are the sign and signature of a world of texts whose literal specificity is what realist fiction represents. In a hyperbolic realist like Dickens, these accents of the real have a feverish aura and an unexpected exactitude. They complete the vision of Dickens that Miller the Elder enables.

    Indeed, Freedgood’s title and the method it employs constitute a broadside deconstruction of the notion of immanence and of the thing-in-itself as a category. Despite the logocentrism of Bill Brown’s “thing theory” in A Sense of Things (2002), Freedgood’s critical practice is not only materialist, but also deconstructive. “No ideas,” says William Carlos Williams in Paterson, “but in things” (1927, 6), even as sensory entities. Things exist as ideas, but not because they are the phenomena that express the noumena of Platonic forms or inherent ideas. It is the other way around: Things exist as ideas because they are the tokens of the types conceived of by the production of material goods and the categories of pertinent perception, even in a pre-capitalist setting. The type/token ratio, as Umberto Eco calls it (1976), measures the way something concrete is the function of its satisfaction of the demands of a semantic inventory. A table is a table because it corresponds to the notion of what a table is. Virginia Woolf gives a familiar exemplification in To the Lighthouse (1927). When Lily asks what Mr. Ramsay’s work is about, his son Andrew advises her to “think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there” (1927, 38). This is not an idealist presentation of a thing-in-itself, but a presentation of the “thing” as it is presented by Freedgood. Victorian objects, like all objects, are “things” because they are parts of a protocol of sensory production whether mechanical or biological. The result is a formidable critical synthesis that is both formal and concrete, synchronic and diachronic, deconstructive and historical.

In Memoriam Virginia Woolf

    What lies beyond the archive? No metaphysical question, this, too, is a strictly material one. What lies beyond the archive is also what lies beyond its vortex: the ungraspable end to interpretation known as death. Here the continuity between Victorian and modern is, as it were, palpable. Without Miller to guide us, however, this palpability is evanescent and inexact. Like Jarndyce and Jarndyce, death, too, is not an end but a constant new beginning. Not the moment when there is no page left to turn, death is, like Borges’s “Book of Sand” (1975), a volume with no beginning and no end. It has new pages every time one consults it. What one consults is the book of death, which, for those left behind, becomes a book of new life. Those who are left behind to mourn are the readers. Virginia Woolf is the most eloquent exemplar of this new kind of life within death.

    Miller’s shocking essay on Mrs. Dalloway (1982), originally written a year before his introduction to Bleak House (1970), cleared away the customary assumption that the modern novel is characterized by the inner speech of its characters in favor of a radical assertion—that a novel like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) has, like a Victorian novel, an omniscient narrator. It also gave the notion of the omniscient narrator a new weight. The omniscient narrator is not simply an observer or even an interpreter. The narrator also has an additional role—that of the mortician. Contra Pater, art no longer aspires to the condition of music. It aspires to the condition of film. “It embalms time,” to use André Bazin’s words, “rescuing it from its proper corruption” (1945, 14). The narrator of Woolf’s novel gathers up all the novel’s characters, living and dead, in a loving embrace. This is true not only of Septimus, who has committed suicide, but also of the old lady whom Clarissa observes in the window across from hers as she imagines her imminent decline as the novel concludes. This Miller calls the modern novel’s funereal function as “the raising of the dead,” as he puts it in Distance and Desire (1970), his book on Hardy. Here the continuity between Victorian and modern fiction is made explicit in a way that throws special light not only on the modern novel but that also spells out the way the modern novel elaborates what is already at work in the nineteenth-century novel. 

    What Clarissa sees in the window is the continuity between herself and everything around her, living, dead, and about to die. Her act of sympathy is an epistemological one. So expansive is the field of determinations within which Woolf’s omniscient narrator situates Clarissa’s character that character as such—discrete, individualized, specific—ceases to exist. In the very act of exalting subjectivity to its presumably most decisive moment in the history of literature, subjectivity is in point of fact disassembled. No wonder Clarissa appears to die at the novel’s close. The machinery of both consciousness and its representation unpacks the coherence of both because it apprehends them both at their real moment of emergence in a social and a historical field—in an archive. This deconstructive turn in the procedure of the modern novel does not separate its achievement from the fiction of the past. It actually recapitulates the structure of the nineteenth-century novel in overdrive. The characteristic structure of the Bildungsroman is a double one, focusing on both the development of an individual and the grand sweep of historical events that underwrites birth, life, and death. Woolf’s narrator does precisely what its precursors in Dickens or Flaubert do, revealing a continuity with them that vitiates our customary assumption that a radical break accompanies the movement from one century to the next. This double focus is a dialectic, one that shows how the individual is a function of cultural forces and how cultural forces are processed through and by the agency of individual subjects. When Woolf expands character to the point of showing how it dissolves into the public force fields that constitute and determine it, she is simply drawing out the implicit dialectic of the Bildungsroman in an explicit way.

    Poised between specificity and oblivion, character inhabits the archive. Once again the infinite regress of textuality is not a hollow formalism, but its very opposite. The fall into the archive is not a fall into a vacuum but into a plentitude. This for Miller is Woolf’s “All Souls’ Day” (1970)—the condition of literary immortality. This literary immortality is located in the reader because the reader also is the archive. “The reader,” says Barthes, “holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (1968, 148). Generation to generation, the reader as archive is where the threads of literary memory are gathered.

    It is in To the Lighthouse that Miller’s insight is played out to greatest effect. Here Virginia Woolf’s own immortality is vouchsafed in an unparalleled instance of this funereal mechanism. To the Lighthouse registers the death of Julia Stephen in the death of Mrs. Ramsay. This is the classic understanding of the novel from an autobiographical point of view. It is Woolf’s way of mourning her mother and of terminating her melancholia. The novel is an act of Kleinian reparation—a forgiving of the mother because of her imagined cruelty to the child. Because the Duckworth brothers’ abuse of the young Virginia is the direct result of Julia’s death—the mother is no longer there to protect the child—Woolf retrospectively blames her mother for the abuse. She is not there to protect her because she is dead. Woolf unconsciously revenges herself upon her by disrupting her wholeness in her memory. Lily’s completion of her painting, as generations of critics have noted, is the sign and seal of the lifting of this revenge and the salutary closure of the daughter’s depression. Mourning replaces melancholia.

    After 1941, however, mourning takes on an entirely new and different status in the novel. In the light of Woolf’s own death, the novel’s object of mourning is no longer Julia Stephen, nor is the mourner Virginia Woolf. The mourner is now Virginia Woolf’s reader and the object of mourning is Virginia Woolf herself. To the Lighthouse becomes a mausoleum. The plural reality to which it is subject as a book of mourning requires us to conceive of it as an archive of souls. The distance with which the reader beholds the novel as Woolf’s mourning for her mother has a second kind of life when it becomes the longing the reader feels for the departed author. It gains speed as history speeds up and it is infinitely personal because it is not personal at all. We create the woman whose death we mourn. It leads to a new kind of archive—the myth of Virginia Woolf.

The Return of the Dead

    Woolf’s prophetic account of her own futurity returns us to Miller’s prophetic role in the later history of the study of Victorian and modern fiction. His enabling recognition that texts are about texts not only opens our awareness of the novel as a form to the reflexivity of its realism, whether the social realism of Victorian fiction or the psychological realism of modern fiction. It also enables the methodology of its presumable opposite, that of the New Historicist reading of fiction. Far from a formalist criticism, Miller’s criticism alerts us to the production of discourse as the key activity in both fiction’s representationalism and its represented worlds. Even more, it provides an enabling role for the reader that unlocks this daunting and endlessly provocative style of critical will. It is, moreover, a reflexive instance of what it describes. It enacts its principles in its own behavior as criticism. All influences gather in an empyrean not unlike the return of the dead in Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Poulet, Derrida, Iser, Barthes, Austin, Foucault, even Freud and Lacan—all come to rest in his work.

"J. Hillis Miller’s All Souls’ Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies". Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller. Ed. Julian Wolfreys and Monika Szuba. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 284-296.

“Green They Shone:”: The Poem As Environment

The Romantic Context of Modern Poetry

    It is a simple step from Orientalism’s miscalculation of ethnicity to Romanticism’s customary assumptions about nature. They are, as M.H. Abrams reminds us, one and the same. Both regard their subject matter as transcendental. Modern poetry’s wish to dethrone its Romantic precursors makes the influence more difficult to shed and makes it repeat Romantic assumptions with an unlikely tenacity. Neither subaltern populations nor landscape are exotic wonders. Like diversity, nature, too, is a complex of discursive systems. Environmentalism’s belief that nature is sacred misses the point it presumes to make. Nature does not lie beyond culture; culture lies within nature. The meaning of “culture,” as Terry Eagleton reminds us (2000), is husbandry—the dialogue between the human species and the natural world. Their relationship is not one of subject and object but of continuity.

    Modern verse is characterized by one very particular habit of Romantic mind that it cannot dispel: the habit, from Wordsworth and Keats to Swinburne and Hardy, of employing landscape and objects as projections of the poet’s state of mind. D.H. Lawrence’s poems are revolutionary because they present what Sandra Gilbert calls “an alternative modernism” that disrupts Romantic and modernist practice alike (2001, 238). They constitute an epistemological break not only from Romanticism but also the flight from it of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. They do not repeat either one but go beyond them both. What emerges instead is something distinct: an environmental relation to nature—I will be specific about this—rather than a use of nature as a screen for imaginative projection or a presumable rejection of the natural world in favor of timeless poetic “monuments,” to use Yeats’s phrase, “of unageing intellect” (1928, 8). For Lawrence, by contrast, the poem is an environment and the environment is a poem. To see Lawrence’s “complex position within modernism,” as Holly Laird puts it (2015, 40:3), requires a brief description of Lawrence’s Romantic context before taking up Eliot, Pound, and H.D. as foils to Lawrence himself.

    Keats’s first Hyperion fragment is a template for Romantic procedure. The landscape is a measure of the poet’s imaginative crisis:

        No stir of air was there,

        Not so much life as on a summer’s day

        Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,

        But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. (1818–1819/1820, 7)

    This is the world behind the world of the poem, its hidden, and toxic, garden, the place of growth that has lost its generative powers. Here the “leaf”—the fact and the instrument of growth and dissemination—is “dead.” “Not one light seed” can travel through the air because the air does not “stir.” Even Wordsworth falls into a Keatsian idiom when his focus is on a microscopic nature, although, because it is Wordsworth, the metaphors are confident rather than depressed:

        Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

        Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:

        Much favored in my birthplace, and no less

        In that beloved Vale to which erelong

        We were transplanted—there were we let loose

        For sports of wider range.                                                           

                                                                                                                         (1850, 1:301–6)

    The seeds are “let loose,” free to disseminate. They are not “dead,” as they are in the constrained and defeated Keats. The tropology, however, links them in a common predisposition to regard nature as a screen for the imagination, a habit of mind that persists as the nineteenth century unfolds.

    Its specificity is disarmingly precise. In Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), the stance is Keatsian, even if the setting is Wordsworthian. Indeed, the relation between the two is the poem’s very subject. The sonorous conclusion to the poem converts possibility into defeat through a slow transformation from Wordsworthian to Keatsian topography. The dramatization of failure is played out in the poem’s splendid technique. A consummate poetic control takes its own loss of control over its subject matter as its theme:

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers,

Desires and dreams and powers

And everything but sleep … .

And all dead years draw thither

And all disastrous things;

Dead dreams of days forsaken,

Blind buds that snows have shaken,

Wild leaves that winds have taken,

Red strays of ruined springs … .

Then star nor sun shall waken,

Nor any change of light:

Nor sound of waters shaken,

Nor any sound or sight:

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,

Nor days nor things diurnal;

Only the sleep eternal

In an eternal night.                                

                                                                                        (1866, 13–16, 67–70, 89–96)

    Hardy’s likeness to Swinburne is well-known. Note how exact the likeness is in both tropology and thematic concern in an early poem like “Neutral Tones” (1867), written only a year after “The Garden of Proserpine”:

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

                                                                                                                                            (1867, 1–4)

    Like Swinburne’s “blown buds,” Hardy’s seeds will not even have a chance to grow in this landscape; it is too cold to allow anything to grow. Like Swinburne’s “wild” and “wintry leaves,” Hardy’s “leaves” are without life. They are “starving.” Like Keats’s “dead leaf,” they have no nourishment in this cold climate that offers the poet little more than a reflection of his imaginative despair. Nor is the frosty “pond” simply a mirror of the poet’s imaginative poverty. “Neutral Tones” is also a poem about a personal relationship that is as dead as the scene that surrounds it. No happy issue is likely in this dual landscape of loss.

Eliot, Pound, H.D.

    This same rhetorical environment is still in place in High Modernism. There is no more baleful landscape of the interior than that of The Waste Land (1922). To find it throughout the poem is not surprising. Eliot’s “broken” “tent” (1922, 173) is the poet’s own imagination in pieces, an apostrophe rather than a reflection of the toxic effects of real life. The imagery of the poem’s opening lines is familiar.

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

                                                                                                                                             (1922, 1–4)

    The “land” is, as it is in Hardy and Swinburne, “dead”; the “stirring” of “roots”—we already know this, too—is impossible. For Eliot, as for all our poets, this presumable crisis in communication is actually an opportunity to have a new subject to write about: the image of nature as a cipher for failure and loss. Eliot’s “objective correlative” (1919a, 145) is Ruskin’s “Pathetic fallacy” (1856, 3: 148) in modern dress. 

    Pound, by contrast, effectively departs from Romantic practice by focusing instead on what Douglas Mao calls “solid objects” (1998) that stand apart from the poet as material wholes reflecting neither the self nor nature. The result, however, is the same—Pound’s objects, like Keats’s urn or Yeats’s Byzantium, are also projections of a poetic ideal. A short lyric such as “Medallion,” the concluding poem of the Mauberley sequence (1920), imitates in its concrete language and austere design the autonomous object it represents and to whose simulation it aspires. When the “solid object” is drawn from nature, however, the Romantic illusion is undone like a trick of magic. It is the real project of “In A Station of the Metro” (1913):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough. (1–2)

    Here the natural image of “petals on a wet, black bough” is called in to elucidate the urban, photographic image of the “faces in the crowd” with which the poem begins. The result is the laying of one snapshot upon another, much as the “petals” lie upon the “black bough.” The natural metaphor doesn’t elucidate the urban one so much as it redoubles its intentional structure as a metaphor. Rather than make the “faces” more vivid, it makes the “petals” in the metaphor more vivid than what they represent. The metaphor’s sequence is the representation of its first representation. For all Pound’s efforts—he brooded over the poem’s composition for almost a year—the result is a Romantic one: The natural image succeeds in redeeming the dreary city by refreshing it through its use as art. The “solid object” is undone by the method of its construction.

    Nature remains a dominion for use even when the poet is H.D. Hieratic and imperious, she, too, finds in nature the sermons that she puts there. The speaker of “Oread” (1914) invokes the turbulence of the sea as a source of power. Although the personae is a classical nymph of the ocean, the speaker is really the poet seeking inspiration for her song. Being overwhelmed by the waves is afflatus, not dejection. It prompts the speaker to assign to the sea attributes from another order of nature, those of the “great pines” whose “green” may match that of the sea in color but whose qualities are different from it as phenomena. The poet has come back to life, thanks to the Romanticism he presumably abjures. The “pools of fir” that the sea becomes in the conceit with which the poem concludes are a metaphor for a metaphor twice removed from a scene that was never anything but a prop for making a poetic object. As it does for Pound, nature remains a source for the poet’s image of a poem.

    Even if one is to grant to Pound’s Imagism the lack of interest in nature for which it is customarily celebrated, a more familiar problem remains. The cost of Imagism’s revolution requires it to distinguish sharply between form and vision, even if vision is secured, as it is in H.D., as a heightened function of form. This is, to be sure, the Romantic distinction between nature and speaker in a different register, but it is also the distinction between the ideal and the concrete that Saussure deconstructs at the same moment in historical time that sees the Imagist experiment in poetry. When Language Poetry invokes Imagism as a literary source, it is justifiable. When it links it to the Saussurean tradition, notably Derrida, it is not. This is, as I noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, the customary misreading of structuralism and deconstruction. Like Saussure, Derrida is no formalist, even if one uplifts him as a prior authority rather than regards him, as New Historicism does, as a foe. Nor is New Formalism’s distinction between confessional and formal poetry more reasonable. Confessional verse often opens new formal vistas as a direct function of its visionary impulses, an inevitability that becomes clear with the arrival of hip hop. Modernism’s more supple revolution in verse comes with the poems of D.H. Lawrence.

D.H. Lawrence’s Revolution in Verse

    Speaker and scene have a wholly different relationship in Lawrence’s poems than they do in those of Eliot, Pound, or H.D. What is Lawrence’s own revolution in verse? Lawrence reorganizes the customary relationship between speaker and scene by reanimating nature and personages in a fresh way. The Romantic practice of using nature as a projection of self is rejected in favor of reexamining the speaker’s relation to landscape. In “The Evening Land,” a poem included in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the project is explicit:

And I, who am half in love with you,

What am I in love with?

My own imaginings? (80–82)

    Interrogating its surroundings, the self is a sequence of Paterian moments in constant dialogue with what lies outside it. Each dissolves into the other. The result is to loosen the distinction between speaker and scene, subject and object, undoing their categorical opposition by apprehending both in the sequence of time (Laird, 1988). “For Lawrence,” writes Marjorie Perloff, “there is no longer a distinction between subject and object, consciousness and the external world. Rather, the new space is one in which the mind and its objects are present in a single realm of proximity” (Perloff, 1985, 126–27).

    This transformation gives new life, not to the speaker—not at first, anyway—but to the environment that surrounds it. This shift in the relation between speaker and scene defines Lawrence’s poems and is their guiding principle. No victim of the fallacy of “expressive form,” as R.P. Blackmur calls it (1935), Lawrence places the speaker in a relation of active exchange with the environment. Above all, it grants the speaker agency. In the process—and in order to do so—poetic language is also reimagined. Its “metaphoricity,” as Fiona Becket puts it, is “radical” (1997, 46). By positing nature and its objects, including human ones, as radically external to the speaker, it prompts speaker and scene to interact.

    The shift is doubly surprising. Lawrence’s real tradition as a poet is neither Eliot’s apostrophic late Romanticism nor Pound’s empiricist modernism. It is pastoral in the strict sense (Empson, 1935; Williams, 1973a). Pastoral is best suited to Lawrence as a poet working to free himself from Romantic precedent. Pastoral is a contradictory literary condition that simultaneously idealizes nature and regards it as a site of working interaction between species and environment. Virgil splits the tension between the two in Theocritus’s Idylls by presenting an Arcadian landscape in the Eclogues and a landscape of labor in the Georgics. In neither case is nature the occasion for Romantic apostrophe—for the expression of imagination through landscape—but for the conversion of idealization to transaction. Lawrence exploits pastoral’s “double function,” as Terry Gifford calls it (1999, 52), by transforming the Arcadian idealization of nature into what Lawrence Buell calls an “ecocentric repossession of pastoral” (1995, 52).

    It is the poet, however, not the farmer, who does the work. Its effects change the environment it seems only to mirror or represent. Lawrence’s language is ecological, not solipsistic. It not only places the poet in the landscape—any subjective utterance does that. Its subjectivity creates, not foils for itself, but predicates that it interrogates and that pass from possibility to recognition, from sowing to harvest. Lawrence’s poetic labor gains agency for both self and other by shaking loose the lineaments of assumption about a scene and its objects the way a farmer—a husband, etymologically a tiller of the soil—shakes a harvest basket to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Husbandry, the working interaction of species and environment, the original meaning of the notion of “culture,” long precedes the ideological distinction between culture and nature that is, like industrial civilization, a product of the nineteenth century. Husbandry is the active work of pastoral as an environmental rather than a Romantic mode. It well expresses the capaciousness of Lawrence’s poetic project by yoking, etymologically, the relation of speaker and its objects in amorous as well as agricultural terms. It yokes the environmental preoccupations of Lawrence’s landscape poems to the erotic preoccupations of both Lawrence’s love poems and his fiction. Neither phallic nor gynocentric, Lawrentian “husbandry” is gender-smashing, “pansexual” in human terms and, mutatis mutandis, also faithful to Pan, the god of agriculture. Lawrence’s environmentalism is holistic. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, roots and stems are continuous; neither is more privileged than the other (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980).

Lawrentian husbandry finds its poetic analogue and source in Whitman. Lawrence’s long-acknowledged debt to his American precursor measures his difference, like Whitman’s own, from High Romanticism. The difference lies in the new relationship between speaker and scene that separates Whitman from Wordsworth, particularly the different status accorded nature despite the continuities in self-absorption and in the interest in common things that they share. For Whitman, nature is genuinely other, not because of a lamentable alienation of self from world, but because of an intentional poetic strategy that regards both natural and domestic things as nurturing and objective rather than as projections of states of mind. Whether it is “the daily housework” in “To Think of Time” (1891–92, VI:66) or “a spear of summer grass” in “Song of Myself” (1891–92, 1:5), what stands apart from the self is what aids in its survival and provides it with delight. Indeed, the link between erotic and agricultural husbandry is entirely explicit:

Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat,

 it shall be you!

Sun so generous it shall be you!

Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall

 be you!

You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!

Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub

 against me it shall be you!

Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak,

 loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!

Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d,

 mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.

                                                                                                                       (1891–92, 24:537–43)

    Lawrence’s poems repay close attention by revealing their common intent as discursive husbandry whether they are long or short, familiar or obscure, brutal or soft-spoken. They are revisions of the situations with which they begin, whether it is the revision of the speaker’s stance toward its objects, its assumptions about them, or its use of figuration to restructure its relationship to them. Let us take up each kind in turn, beginning with a canonical poem, “Snake,” and concluding with a very brief and presumably marginal one, “Green.”

    These poems come from different moments in Lawrence’s career—”Snake” from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), “Green” from Look! We Have Come Through (1917)—but they share a stance despite the time of their publication, and they share a style. Keith Sagar has argued that Birds, Beasts and Flowers marks a shift in Lawrence’s verse defined by “a healthy purging of his hitherto … anthropomorphic relation to nature” and its replacement by a concern with “systems, interactions, and interdependencies”—with “what,” says Sagar, “we have come to call ecology” (2001, 14, 152.) This is true, to be sure, not only of “Snake,” but of other poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers such as “Almond Blossom” and “Cypresses.” Sagar, however, overstates the case. Lawrence’s concern with ecology rather than anthropomorphism is actually present in his verse from the start. Lawrence’s reassessment of the relation between speaker and scene is not a function of his development but part of a strategy that attends his poems as a whole. Indeed, the early “Green” is an even more radical reassessment of the relation between speaker and scene than those at work in the later “Snake” and “Almond Blossom.” Its syntactical specificity in elaborating this reassessment is extraordinary, and shows the constancy of Lawrence’s poetic design.

    “Snake” dismantles Romantic allegory before redefining it. The speaker’s sun-bleached encounter with the snake outside his house (“hus” or “house” is the first syllable of “husband”) is by turns tender, stark, and matter-of-fact. It requires little in the way of close or figural reading because of its almost novelistic directness, narrating the speaker’s shifting emotions as he and the snake exchange looks and measure one another, less to assess a course of action than to assess each other’s potential meaning for the other.

    Here allegory intervenes, not on the part of the poet but on the part of the reader. This is the real text of the poem, from which the reader is visibly absent. But the reader, of course, is, invisibly, everywhere, trying to make the poem tell a story that it does not tell. “Consciousness,” says Gifford, “is transformed into conscience” as the poet subdues his sense of the snake as evil, and, as this allegorical reading of the poem concludes, “awe is transformed into humility” (1999, 163). The dangers of reading “Snake” in this way, however, are what the poem enacts. Like Milton’s language of temptation in his descriptions of the Garden of Eden, assessing sense in “Snake” tests the reader, not the poet. Eve’s “ringlets” are “wanton” in a pre-fallen state (1674, 4: 306), not for our original parents, who are innocent, but for the postlapsarian reader, who, as Stanley Fish has pointed out (1967), is not. Similarly, the speaker in Lawrence’s poem is innocent. This is an open-ended encounter by a water-trough, although Lawrence’s reader is led, inevitably, into looking for significance where there is none beyond what is stated. Lawrence’s literalism is actually a high form of figuration. To recant a symbolic fall or slothfulness is the reader’s first duty. To do so is also to enact what the poem itself enacts—a shift from allegory in the traditional sense to one in the modern sense. Not a key that unlocks a door, the signifier “snake” is a key that unlocks every door, a process of reading whereby the reader forsakes reading by fixed codes in favor of reading signs as metalanguage. Allegory here, as it is for Angus Fletcher (1964) or Paul de Man (1979), means reading the signifier, not for what it means—not, that is, as a sign—but for what it may be said to mean—as a signifier. Lawrence shakes off the sign much as he does the water with which he bathes himself in the sun. What is separated from the sign or husk is the seed which is its real bounty.

    In “Cypresses,” Lawrence denies allegory while simultaneously resurrecting it. It is the reverse of the avuncular undoing of the snake’s allegorical trappings. Because the speaker denies that “a great secret” (6) is to be found among the cypresses, it grants them a new kind of meaning by virtue of its denial. Is there “a great secret” (6) to the Tuscan cypresses? They are “monumental” (10), but they have “shed their sound and finished all their echoing” (26). The natural image is a “monument” because it is not. The idealization allows Lawrence—quite unlike Keats and his nightingale or Hardy and his thrush—to plunge back into the environment rather than to stand apart from it:

They say the fit survive;

But I invoke the spirits of the lost.

Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,

To bring their meaning back into life again. (72–75)

    What is “monumental” is survival—the survival of the species, thanks to death, not despite it. Death is the principle of life, not its antithesis. It is the precondition of life in all its mutability. The poem, like the Etruscan cypresses, is an environment with which the speaker interacts, not a tableau of his imagination or a symbol for his conquest of time.

    In a poem such as “Almond Blossom,” Lawrence refashions allegory by collapsing the difference between nature and culture with which the poem begins. Its end is in its beginning. Tenor and vehicle are inappropriate categories with which to assess metaphors which are not, as it turns out, metaphors. Nor are their components distinct classes of external phenomena:

Even iron can put forth,

Even iron. (1–2)

    Far from hypostatizing the traditional battle between nature and culture for which Lawrence is customarily celebrated, the poem calls into question the stability of the opposition by subjecting “iron” to the same natural process of decay as that which assails the almond tree. The common force that binds them is what, in Pater’s words, “rusts iron and ripens corn” (1873, 234). Indeed, “iron” is also a natural element. It is listed on the table of elements. But, like the serpent, culture has enlisted it to signify its dominance over nature in the manufacturing age to which Nottingham, and Lawrence’s lungs, are witness and victim.

    The poem makes no bones about this double movement, granting to “iron” both its natural status and the cultural one for which it has become a second-order signifier—a “myth” in Roland Barthes’s sense (1957):

This is the iron age,

But let us take heart

Seeing iron break and bug,

Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.

The almond tree,

December’s bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.

The almond tree,

That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake

In supreme bitterness. (3–11)

    Referring to his own work, Lawrence even likens the mythology of “iron” to that of the “snake.” “Like a snake,” iron has been socialized, as it were. The proof is its “supreme bitterness.” Iron’s literalness, exemplified by its variety of uses in the material world—“bare iron hooks”—is evacuated by the chain of transformations by means of which it is denaturalized as the line concludes—“sticking out of the earth.” Its literalness is vouchsafed by its subsequent figural destiny, which is, ironically, another kind of literalness, this one stemming, as it were, once more from its organic status. In a companion poem, “Bare Almond Trees,” the trees’ branches are also material—“like iron implements, twisted hideous”—but are once again, in the same figuration, “sticking out of the earth” as the line concludes (8).

    No wonder “trees suffer,” as Lawrence puts it later in “Almond Blossom” (25). They are “like races” (25). The comparison is discomfiting but logically consistent in the constant figural exchange. “Iron,” “trees,” “races”—categorically distinct, presumably, but neither epistemologically distinct in their behavior as signifiers, nor politically distinct in their behavior as elements in history. Iron and trees alike are “like drawn blades” that are “never sheathed” (27). Like “races” in history, they cross boundaries. They are “alien trees in alien lands” (28). They are characterized by their “prolixity” (35). Because, like “iron,” “trees” can mean many things, the myths of history and its ideas can subdue them into meaning only one thing. Meaning, to use Saussure’s words, “follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based on tradition, it is arbitrary” (1916, 74). Even “the Cross”(48) is a tree whose elemental status and its mythical one are at odds in the dual glory to which it pretends. It “steps out” of its own “sacred forthcoming” (56) as a religious sign or symbol to become “a naked tree of blossom” (57)—a migrant sème or floating signifier. The tree reveals itself to be a tree, not a Cross, naked and true not because of its symbolic glory but despite it. Its simplicity is inseparable from its symbolism since its sacredness is, by definition, a transcendence of its simplicity.

“Green They Shone”

    A brief and seemingly marginal poem such as “Green” allows Lawrence to engage in the kind of renewed agency for the poetic speaker that this heightened practice can produce in even the most miniature form. “Green” requires an allegorical reading more than “Snake” because it offers no first-order allegorizations. Like “Almond Blossom,” its focus is, despite its human result, on its materials. They are not even phenomena. The title of the poem designates its real actor (or, more precisely, its chief actant), the signifier “green.” Note the career of the signifier as the poem unfolds. Here is the text in full:

The dawn was apple-green,

 The sky was green wine held up in the sun,

The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green

 They shone, clear like flowers undone

For the first time, now for the first time seen. (1–6)

    First, “green” is a predicate. It is what the subject “dawn” is (1). Then, it is an object—“the sky was green wine” (2). The color is assigned, not to the sky, as it is to dawn, but to the metaphor for the sky, “wine.” It is, in other words, now positioned wholly apart from the subject, as something that measures it, but measures it as something different and distinct from it at the very moment its intent is to heighten its specificity. Finally, “green” is, by virtue of the Latinate inversion which makes the color of the beloved’s eyes precede and even usurp the place of the eyes themselves, a subject in its own right—“green/They shone.”

    The poem as a whole is a reverse declension of the same signifier from object (“green” as a third position in relation to a subject, grammatically another person or thing) to subject—“green” becomes agent: “green/They shone.” The inversion or transplant from another language’s structure into English accomplishes a change in the architecture of the English expression itself, expanding its expressiveness by an act of rhetorical husbandry. Husbandry, by definition, is an activity that is both natural and cultural or, to put it more exactly, that is really neither one. It is both. When noun and adjective—“green” and “green”—trade places, substance and characteristic also do so. When they are aided in doing so, thanks to the fortuitous nature of rhyme—a pure coincidence of sound that appears to mirror sense without epistemological justification—the status of the identity of noun and characteristic as contingent is secured and erased at one and the same time.

    This paradox or deconstructive turn is precisely Lawrence’s point and advances his environmental agenda. The fluctuation in language and the fluctuation among its objects are also one and the same. The transposition of what is presumably external to speech is accomplished by a rhetorical transposition within speech. By virtue of his figural virtuosity, Lawrence resituates the object into a subject. Language effects a phenomenological change in the environment. It is the labor by which the poet actively engages the environment to produce a transformation in both the environment and himself.

    The inversion of “green” and “green” encapsulates wider and wider aspects of Lawrence’s art and even his life. As an act of figural husbandry, Lawrence’s art also transplants the Latinate—“the warm South,” in Keats’s phrase (1819, 15)—into his poetic diction, much as Lawrence transplanted himself into warmer and warmer climes, from the Mediterranean to New Mexico, to accommodate his illness. The same aim attends both his writing and his body: making the subject “green” or healthy, repositioning it from being an object or victim into being an active and living principle that redeems its own fate at the hands of time.

1. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

2. Becket, Fiona. 1997. D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

3. Blackmur, R.P. 1935. “D.H. Lawrence and Expressive Form.” In Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1974.

4. Buell, Lawrencee. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

5. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

6. De Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press.

7. Eagleton, Terry, 2000. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. 

8. Eliot, T.S. 1919. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1932.

9. Eliot, T.S. 1922. The Waste Land. In Collected Poems (1963). Rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

10. Empson, William. 1935. Some Versions of Pastoral. Rpt. New York: New Directions, 1974.

11. Fish, Stanley. 1968. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost.’ Second Edition, 1998. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

12. Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

13. Gifford, Terry. 1999. Pastoral. London and New York: Routledge. Gilbert, Sandra M. 2001. “Apocalypse now (and then), Or, D.H. Lawrence and the swan in the electron.”

14. Gifford, Terry.The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 235-52.

15. Hardy, Thomas. 1867. “Neutral Tones.” Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1968.

16. H[ilda] D[oolitle]. 1914. “Oread.” In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1988.

17. Keats, John. 1818-19/1820. Hyperion: A Fragment. In Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Riverside, 1959.

18. Keats, John.“Ode to a Nightingale.” In Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Riverside, 1959.

19. Laird, Holly. 1988. Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2015.

20. Laird, Holly.“Introduction: A Poet for the Ages.” D.H. Lawrence Review. 40:2 (2015), 1-10.

21. Lawrence, D.H. All references and citations are from The Works of D.H. Lawrence: The Poems. Vol 1. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

22. Mao, Douglas. 1998. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

23. Milton, John. 1674. Paradise Lost. In Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York, The Odyssey Press, 1957.

24. Pater, Walter. 1873. “Conclusion.” In The Renaissance. New Library Edition. London: Macmillan, 1910.

25. Perloff, Marjorie. 1985. “Lawrence’s Lyric Theater: Birds, Beasts and Flowers.” D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Philip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 108-29.

26. Pound, Ezra. 1913. “In A Station of the Metro.” In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1957.

27. Pound, Ezra. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1957.

28. Ruskin, John. 1856. Modern Painters. Vol. 3. Rpt. London: J.M. Dent, n.d. Sagar, Keith, 2001. “The Resurrection of Pan: Teaching Biocentric Consciousness and Deep Ecology in Lawrence’s Poetry and Late Nonfiction.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of D.H. Lawrence. Eds. M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001, 146-156.

29. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Eds. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

30. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1866. “The Garden of Proserpine.” In Selected Poems. Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1987.

31. Whitman, Walt. 1891-2. “To Think of Time.” In Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michel Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.

32. Whitman, Walt. 1891-2. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michel Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.

33. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press.

34. Wordsworth, William. 1850. The Prelude. In Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed.Jack Stillinger. Boston: Riverside, 1968.

 

 “‘Green They Shone:’: The Poem As Environment.” The D.H. Lawrence Review 43, no. 1/2 (2018): 66–80.