W O R D S W O RTALEXANDER H AND INFA FREER NCY ALEXANDER FREER Wordsworth and the Infancy of Affection All the new thinking is about loss. —Robert Hass1 1 ordsworth’s “ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of Early Childhood” contrasts its speaker’s current existence W with the recollections of infancy which he is neither able to fully recall, nor completely evade. The poem insists on the minimal continuity between infant sensation and adult experience. Infant experience is shown to be both an impossible topic and the only possible topic for a poem about origins: impossible because the representation of infant experience is undermined even at the level of the sentence; necessary because this experience is nonetheless the only source of insight we have into the nature of the soul. In opposition to critics who either seek to elevate adulthood over infancy and read the poem as a consolation of philosophy, or elevate infancy over adulthood and read the poem as nostalgic elegy, I will follow Stuart Sperry and Kenneth Johnston in acknowledging Wordsworth’s productive ambivalence between the two states. The “Ode,” as Johnston notes, succeeds in “deriving gain from the felt reality of loss,” but it does not suppose a calculation of overall proªt or loss.2 My aim is to substantiate an “ambivalent” interpretation of the poem through a broadly psychoanalytic reading of the “Ode” and its consideration of infant and adult experience. Using and extending Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Lyric Poetry, I will suggest how the poem might both acknowledge an irreversible loss and maintain what Sperry calls “an almost physical sense of continuity through time.”3 Conti1. Hass, Praise (New York: Echo Press, 1979), 4. 2. Johnston, “Recollecting Forgetting: Forcing Paradox to the Limit in the ‘Intimations Ode,’” The Wordsworth Circle 2, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 64. 3. Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode’: Wordsworth and the Function of Memory,” The Wordsworth Circle 1, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 41. SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 79 80 ALEXANDER FREER nuity is possible, I will argue, through discontinuity: the lost affects of infancy that momentarily return, transªgured, in adult life. To this end, I will also question an assumption of some more recent accounts of the “Ode” which assert determinate narratives. John Beer suggests Wordsworth achieves “adult stability,” Paul Fry contends that the speaker voluntarily gives up childhood pretending, and James Chandler reads the text as a “progress poem.”4 Such readings rely on the cogency of what Daniel W. Ross calls “Wordsworth’s carefully rationalized conclusion that the ‘philosophic mind’ is worth surrendering the powers of childhood for.”5 We should note the language of choice here: the speaker is to be commended for accepting adulthood and, for Fry and Ross, deciding to “grow up.” Such comparisons allow commentators, following in the tradition of Helen Vendler, to paint the “Ode” as poetic and intellectual progress.6 Equally, for critics who do not intuitively prefer the philosophic mind to “God, who is our home,” such conclusions are unfounded. As Anya Taylor demonstrates, there is a tradition of religious readings which arrive at the opposite conclusion.7 As Vendler notes, there is a degree of questionbegging at work on both sides: Those readers who respond most strongly to the powerful adaptation of religious language at the opening of the ode will continue to feel that the dirge, having the “best” lines, is the “real” subject of the poem. Those who prefer the stoic and reparatory adult tone of the ending may agree with Trilling in rebuking the elegiac partisan.8 The debate is premised on the adult speaker realizing either that adulthood is superior (cognitively richer) or indeed inferior (spiritually poorer) to childhood. Yet the “time” “when meadow, grove, and stream . . . To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light” cannot be clearly recollected by the adult speaker.9 It seems more pressing that we ask why this is. The obvious answer, that he has straightforwardly forgotten, does not ring true. The 4. Beer, Wordsworth in Time (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), 110–11; Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 153; Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode: Romanticism and the Progress of Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, eds. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 144. 5. Ross, “Seeking a Way Home: The Uncanny in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode,’” SEL, 1500–1900 32, no. 4 (1992): 625. 6. Vendler, “Lionel Trilling and the Immortality Ode,” Salmagundi 41 (1978): 69. 7. Taylor, “Religious Readings of the Immortality Ode,” SEL, 1500–1900 26, no. 4 (1986): 633–34. 8. Vendler, “Lionel Trilling,” 81. 9. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared R. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 81 poem depends on two antagonistic claims: that something “heavenly” from before infancy is necessarily lost (not just renounced), and that in spite of, even because of, this loss, mature life is shaped by infant experience; there is a continuity of the soul. Where the two claims intersect is not a contradiction so much as a telling absence. Infancy, as its etymology implies, occurs prior to the genesis of a speaking voice and of an “I” who speaks. The poem contends that infancy is also closer to a prior heavenly existence, the memory of which will fade as the infant develops. This proximity legitimates research into infant experience, but the fading forecloses the completion of that research. What is lost in maturity appears only through a negation: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (9). I want to suggest that the loss charted by the “Ode” is intimately connected to the “I have seen.” There is something about saying “I” which marks the speaker as having fallen away from “celestial light” and “blessèd creatures” into a world of mediated experience, because the “I” is the opposite of the oceanic existence of infancy. To put it another way, what has been lost is impossible to represent in the form of “I sensed x,” because a precondition of using the “I” is the separation from the world of immediacy. Thus, poetry that would speak of “the growth of a poet’s mind” must speak of what it cannot represent. What is produced is poetry that knows its descriptive task is, in the last analysis, impossible. Yet the loss is bearable—writing is still possible—because the poetry can invoke the minimal, phenomenological continuity between infancy and adulthood: singular, momentary feelings of joy that together make up a history of affective life, the “almost physical” continuity of the soul. In the next section, I make my case for this reading; in the one following, I consider the changing relation of speaker to world via a critique of James Chandler’s position; and ªnally, I consider some more general implications for reading Wordsworth’s poetry. 2 In lyric poetry, Mutlu Konuk Blasing contends, the saying of “I” is not simply given; it charts the developmental journey of an individual who began life speechless. She writes: We need to consider the special status of the mother tongue and the lived history of the transformation of random muscular and sonic phenomena into recognizable elements of a sign system. This ªrst stage of Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 271, lines 1, 3–4. Line numbers from this edition will be cited hereafter within the text. 82 ALEXANDER FREER language acquisition makes for an individuating emotional history in language. . . . [P]oetry returns to that history of seduction and discipline into language.10 Poetry is implicated in “that history of ‘forgetfulness’” in which the original, pre-linguistic experience of the world is renounced for the world of signs. But while this original state is given up and “forgotten,” we also fail to forget entirely: words remain haunted by the violence of their origin, and “the remainder that cannot be represented in verbal language.”11 Blasing skillfully orients lyric poetry towards the personal historicity of a speaker, demonstrating the affective journey that all language (and lyric above all) remembers but cannot step outside in order to observe. Poetry and infancy are antagonistic, because to speak at all is to speak against infancy. Yet, they are also inseparable: words have power over us precisely because they had to be painfully acquired. Beginning with language acquisition (or rather some putative point of non-language directly before), Blasing’s history skips from the beginning of life directly to this moment of linguistic encounter. The risk is that the development of the infant qua autonomous being is collapsed into the individuating operation of the personal pronoun which becomes Blasing’s “lyric I.” To be clear, this is not a criticism of Blasing’s project in its own terms, but I want to expand the scope and reach further back to Freud’s conception of the “I.” It is not only the speaking subject that is implicated in lyric language but also the possibility of a subject as such. There is a tension in Blasing’s study between her psychohistorical account of language acquisition and mainstream psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps because her conclusions can sound rather Freudian at times—regarding the power of infant experience to shape adult life, and in her reading language for signs of a forgotten history—she is careful to distance her study from Freud. “What Freudian theory represses,” she contends, “is the history of the transformation of animal sounds to symbolic language.”12 The weakness of the psychoanalytic framework, on this reading, is that while it detects erotic life operating at the level of language, its stakes are fundamentally symbolic. It comprehends erotic life’s subversion of language through puns, accidental portmanteaus and parapraxes; its axes of language are condensation and displacement. In short, psychoanalysis as10. Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 46–47. 11. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47–48. 12. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 62; cf. also her comment on Freud’s 1923 essay, “The Ego and the Id,” 60. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 83 sumes the tyranny of the signiªer (Lacan’s use of structural linguistics is the paradigmatic case). The clear problem for Blasing is that if the unconscious is “structured like a language,” as Lacan’s slogan goes, the structuring has always already happened, without proper examination.13 Yet psychoanalysis (including Lacanian) has much to say about the extrasymbolic aspects of language (stammers, coughs, muteness, screams, an untimely case of the hiccups), not to mention other communicative registers: the gaze, touch, tone, and so on. Blasing’s criticism is perhaps more relevant regarding how psychoanalysis has been appropriated in literary studies as a “strategy” of reading poems. Her dismissal of Freud’s own work as unthinkingly symbolic, however, seems to mistake the preconscious (which is “structured like a language,” or at least oriented towards language) for Freud’s model of the subject as such. The salient point for my purposes is this: Freud’s “I” (or “ego,” in the Latinized jargon of his English translator, James Strachey) is not a linguistic structure. Indeed, it is a prior condition for language: an internal conception of an “I” must be in place before one can coherently speak as an “I.” We can extend Blasing’s history of the “lyric I” by asking how one might come to identify as an “I” at all. In his 1914 paper “On Narcissism,” Freud encounters a problem of origins when trying to determine the beginnings of narcissistic pleasure. Speciªcally, if narcissism resides in self-pleasure (ego-pleasure, we might say), how does it begin? It cannot be the default position. Just as the “raw” can only follow the “cooked,” self-pleasure only makes sense in contrast to object-pleasure. Narcissism assumes a self/world distinction in which object choices exist, including oneself. In Freud’s “economic” terms, narcissism is the libidinal investment of the ego qua object-choice; it is a selfbinding of libido (versus an “external investment”). Freud realizes that narcissism should thus be differentiated from (unbound) bodily pleasure as such—that is, auto-eroticism. What the distinction reveals is the falsehood of assuming the “I” or ego to be a natural or spontaneous development: [W]e are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very ªrst; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism—a new psychical action—in order to bring about narcissism.14 13. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 737. 14. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),” in The Standard Edition of 84 ALEXANDER FREER The “new psychical action” is not deªned by Freud, although various theorists have proposed solutions. What is at stake, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, is “the relative stabilization of the circulation of libido in the child’s body, so that the division between subject and object (even the subject’s capacity to take itself as an object) becomes possible for the ªrst time.”15 The acquisition of the linguistic “I,” while certainly a vast step in development, must be preceded by a more fundamental adaptation: the basic self/other distinction, or, the psychogenesis of self. The pre-ego infant experiences pleasure in its pure immediacy, outside what Winnicott calls the “me” and “notme.”16 In the polymorphous perversity of auto-eroticism, excitation is possible in any part of the body and across the whole sensory manifold. It is misleading to speak of “engagement” with the world, not because the infant is a monad, but quite the opposite: because he has no sense of “self ” to distinguish from the world, there only is excitation. It is difªcult to appreciate how alien this world is to ours: not merely experience before language (intangible enough) but experience prior to an assumption of subject and object; nothing but the immediate, affective experiences of pleasure and pain, felt indiscriminately across the whole sensorium. This resembles the pre-worldly life of the infant in the “Ode” insofar as an “immortal sea” suggests the complete absence of boundaries, and a world without discrete objects. What I want to suggest is that the speaker’s transition from heaven to earth can be productively understood as analogous to the formation of the ego. The “sleep and forgetting” would, therefore, be of the sensuous immediacy only possible prior to the mental boundary between self and world. The premise of the “Ode” is that the speaker has been estranged from the experience of early childhood (and heaven before that), but still faintly recollects it. Like Blasing’s account of the entry into language, the transition necessitates loss: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere it’s setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14 (1914–1916), ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 76–77; my emphases. 15. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 32. 16. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), 2. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 85 From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (58–66) The weight of these lines rests on the initial rupture more than the subsequent amnesia. It is not merely the presence of an almost-remembered dream, like an unreachable itch. This almost-memory is glorious. There is a rich, sensuous content given to infant experience (the “celestial light”), which is quite unlike adult, mediated experiences of the world. Rather than a lost physical substance, “light” suggests a change in the way the world is seen: in its phenomenal qualities. If a “new psychical action” is to account for such “a sleep and a forgetting,” it too must be sensuously rich. For these reasons, I want to consider the psychogenesis of the self as a bounded object, not just in terms of the acquisition of language (which, as discussed, already assumes a self/world distinction, without which the notion of communication is incoherent). Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage” does just this in the visual register, providing a quasi-Hegelian account in which infants identify with their mirror images, and then with themselves as individuals through the individuated “imago.” But, bearing in mind the condition I imposed for sensuous content, I turn instead to Didier Anzieu’s concept of the “skin ego.” The skin ego, Anzieu suggests, is an ur-ego: an early psychical appreciation of oneself as a bounded object, which rests on the subject’s growing physical awareness of the skin as envelope or container. The physical envelope is, of course, “there from the start” in healthy newborns, but the psychical equivalent must be developed. It is because “as Freud allusively remarks, touch is the only one of the ªve external senses which possesses a reºexive structure” that the skin is especially disposed to suggest a psychic “inside” and “outside.”17 Thus: When the baby is . . . held in the mother’s arms and pressed against her body, whose warmth, smell and movements it feels; it is picked up, manipulated, rubbed, washed and caressed, all this usually amidst a ºood of words and humming. . . . These activities lead the child progressively to differentiate a surface which has both an inner and an outer face, in other words, an interface, permitting a distinction between inside and outside.18 The infant, for Anzieu, is bombarded with affection across the whole sensorium, but the skin, due to its special reºexive status, is the biological sub17. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 61. 18. Anzieu, Skin Ego, 36–37. 86 ALEXANDER FREER strate, which a notion of individuality ªrst “leans on” (anaclisis, in Strachey’s Latin). Before any possible (transitional) objects emerge, the relationship with the caring adult takes a tragic form: it is love, expressed in touching, stroking, swaddling, and holding, which brings about the ªrst alienation of the infant from the world. The actions of the carer, which express the (desired) affective unity of adult and child, also conªrm their physical disunity. Through the constant stimulation, the “intra-uterine phantasy” of non-contact gives way (except for the profoundly autistic) “to the phantasy of a common skin” in which skin-sensations are related by the infant to the supposed unity of infant and carer through touch. Thanks to its reºexive nature, touch conªrms the carer’s presence at the cost of conªrming the gap between them. Since the carer never utterly surrounds the infant (unlike the sea, or the womb), her or his presence is temporary. Their separation is permanent. What follows in typical infants is “the suppression of this [fantasy of ] common skin and the recognition that each has his or her own skin, a recognition which does not come about without resistance and pain.”19 The development of the skin-ego, the very ªrst step towards selfhood, comes about with the waning of fantasies of enclosure, perpetual care, and unlimited contact. Moreover, the positing of the self who can relate to objects, and indeed the self who can speak, is the ªrst alienation from those objects: “the object, like the word, is born out of the distance from us that we have to resign ourselves to allow it to assume.”20 Here we see an instance of the thoroughly Wordsworthian character of much psychoanalytic theory. Not only does Freud insist “the child is father of the man,” but Anzieu practically asserts: “heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Anzieu’s early development narrative runs close to Wordsworth’s verse narratives. Not only in the “Ode,” where “the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm,” but also in the lexically related passage in The Prelude which begins “Bless’d be the infant Babe,” where “by intercourse of touch / I held mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart.”21 In the 1799 text, second part, this passage begins: Bless’d the infant Babe (For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our being) blest the Babe Nursed in his Mother’s arms, the Babe who sleeps 19. Anzieu, Skin Ego, 63. 20. Jacques André, “The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu),” trans. Richard B. Simpson, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2006): 571. 21. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 62, lines 312–13; my emphasis. Line numbers from this edition will be cited hereafter within the text. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 87 Upon his Mother’s breast, who when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye! (267–73) The connection is made again between the “Babe,” his mother’s arms, and joy. The blessed infant is physically separate from his mother, but his “soul” still “claims manifest kindred.” Translating “soul” as “psyche” (or vice versa) is not without precedent, and if we do so there is an obvious similarity to Anzieu. Isn’t the fantasy of common skin an assertion of the shared psychic entity of a sensuous manifold, a related soul? But Wordsworth analyzes the scene further than Anzieu, recognizing that nursing involves two: the fantasy of commonality is not the spontaneous response to being born and nursed, which Anzieu sometimes implies, but rather a response to the desire already present in the caring adult, who him- or herself recalls and believes in infant “glory” (as does the speaker of the “Ode”). To put it another way, all the love and fantasy Anzieu ascribes to the infant can also be traced back to the carer: “the Babe . . . Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!”22 Taking a less uniformly “adult” perspective than the “Ode,” the subsequent passage of The Prelude understands separation as a source of wonder and possibility. In the Freudian notion of “leaning on,” sexual pleasure ªrst cohabits with biological function, but comes to exist independently (oral eroticism outlasts breastfeeding). Wordsworth articulates a notion of “leaning” in the language of affection: I was left alone Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why: The props of my affections were removed And yet the building stood as if sustained By its own spirit. (322–26) “As if ” carries a great deal of weight here. It suggests both that the mature affections have origins (the fundamental claim of the “Ode”) and that the house of consciousness is not reducible to its foundations. A ªxation on the former leads to crude, mechanistic Freudianism, the latter to egoistic and naïve assertions of self-sufªciency. At his ªnest, Wordsworth achieves this difªcult balance in his efforts to “trace the progress of our being.” The “Bless’d be the infant Babe” passage directly follows The Prelude’s 22. This is also the move made by Jean Laplanche in New Foundations: the infant pleasure at the breast, so beloved by psychoanalysis, mirrors the adult pleasure in the contact of lips and skin. 88 ALEXANDER FREER musing on “the history and birth of each / As of a single independent thing” (260–61). Together, Anzieu and Blasing provide a psycho-historical account of just this. Firstly, there is the physical birth, in which the infant is literally separated from a larger being.23 Secondly, there is the formation of the ego, initially in the form of a skin ego, later in the other sensory registers (for brevity I will focus only on this moment of ego-genesis). The skin ego institutes a primitive self/other distinction, demoting oceanic autoeroticism and the “shared skin” of caregiver and child from phenomenal actuality into latent fantasy. Following the acquisition of the ego, or selfhood, there is language acquisition, which compounds the “history of forgetfulness,” both through further disciplining of the body (vocal control recalls sphincter control) and a psychic development: acquiring a predeªned semantic system. “The institution of the symbolic function rests on infantile amnesia,” Blasing comments.24 This account is also the story of how pure sensuous immediacy is left behind. By temporalizing the acquisition of selfhood, self and non-self objects, the most basic assumption of an “I,” are not merely given, but rather the products of a development that is both a gain (of the “I”) and a loss (of oceanic immediacy). If the “Ode” recalls a time of free-moving libido and pure sensuous immediacy, it explains why it is necessarily true that “the things which I have seen I now can see no more.” Hence all sense-impressions now seem to be missing an intangible quality: The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose, The Moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth. (10–18) The “celestial light” and “glory” of infancy cannot be captured or represented by the speaker, only their loss is registered. The smells and colors and warmth that once overpowered now merely please. Sensation is “lost” in the sense of something foreclosed, rather than misplaced; it is his being a speaker (an “I,” a user of language) that prevents the speaker’s return to infant sensation. Hence, “the things which I have seen” in the “adult” under23. Noted in Beer, Wordsworth in Time, 111. 24. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47–48. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 89 standing of “things” never existed: infant sensations cannot be found by looking for lost objects in adult life. By ªguring his loss as an aura or “glory,” the speaker suggests as much. It is not the object that escapes, but the experience of the object. There are additional beneªts of the reading I propose. First, the psychoanalytic attention to early human sensation reminds us that infant experience is no less real than mature experience of the world of objects. It is less differentiated and structured, but more vivid and present. However comforting it might be for some modern critics to equate Wordsworth’s “soul talk” with infant fantasy, to be relinquished in favor of “reality,” the equation is inaccurate. Secondly, this reading allows the poem to act as a corrective to the temptation in psychoanalysis after Freud to naturalize the split between subject and object (or ego and world) from the outset, which Laplanche calls “the closing-in-on-itself of the Freudian psychical system, its monadological character.”25 By naturalizing the “I,” its status as a compromise-formation (and therefore the loss inherent to any compromise) can be diminished or overlooked. This is a psychoanalytic equivalent to the “progressive” reading of the “Ode,” whereby infant loss can be mitigated by adult achievement. Hence, I will address James Chandler’s recent reading of the poem, which makes just this claim. 3 In contrast to what I suggested was a false equivalence (or a false “choice”) between infancy and adulthood, as I read the poem, infant experience persists in adult life as an absence, and this transªguration is structurally necessary. This has implications when we consider the conclusions the speaker reaches by the end of the poem. Infancy and adulthood are sufªciently different that for the adult who speaks and writes there is no indication that “getting back the object” of infant experience would be satisfying, even if it were possible. What the child of the poem knows, and the speaker comes to realize, is that there is no weighing of the options, and no choice involved in development (any more than one chooses autism and womb-return fantasies). However glorious it was, there is no going back. The speaker initially frames infant development as a “seduction” by the earth, but eventually comes to understand it as a necessary part of adult experience. Indeed, the speaker is forced to abandon his fantasy of a return to infant wisdom not least because he recognizes that the child strives for development. “Earth ªlls her lap with pleasures of her own,” and the child pursues it. 25. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, trans. Luke Thurston, Leslie Hill, and Philip Slotkin (London: Routledge, 1999), 83. 90 ALEXANDER FREER Thus Chandler is correct to describe the child’s pursuit of the world of adult custom as “a deep expression of dissatisfaction with the merely sensual order of the world.”26 Unburdened by nostalgia, the child appreciates what the speaker must come to appreciate: that mere (infant) sensation is radically insufªcient to one who is an “I.” The speaker’s desire to return to early infant pleasure would be thoroughly disappointing if it were magically realized. It may help to recall the frustrations of Sense Certainty in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: in pure sensuous certainty, consciousness supposes itself to have the richest and most immediate comprehension of the world, but whenever it tries to represent or declare the contents of its comprehension, they slip away.27 What is “right here” ceases to be in the instant the claim is made, and the “here” and “now” reveals itself to be an empty structure, “a simple plurality of Heres . . . a simple plurality of Nows.”28 Without the use of properties, qualities, or other mediating structures, “the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language.”29 There is no experience, however rich, that will ªx the structural problem posed by representation. Because the advocate of Sense Certainty is, unlike the pre-ego infant, already an “I,” it desires to represent its experience (to its future self, to others), which is only to say it desires to form sentences that include the ªrst-person pronoun. And this is precisely what it cannot do using only Sense Certainty, regardless of how wonderful or striking any particular sensation might be. Being an “I,” a world of sensuous immediacy is always already lost; not because the object goes anywhere, but because in the presence of an “I,” immediate experience becomes thin and superªcial. The “I” of the Phenomenology has its own character: it will utterly commit to each position along its way (the assertions of sense certainty, perception, force and understanding, and so on). This is not so in Wordsworth; as Hartman notes, “there is always a reserve in the experiences Wordsworth depicts.”30 The “I” of the Phenomenology can abandon sensuous certainty (and each subsequent position) because Hegel’s dialectics assume the “external” mediation of everything internal to the subject: [T]he attempts of the individual to understand the universal as a scheme, property or feeling within itself, are constantly subverted by 26. Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode,” 150. 27. I am indebted in my reading of the Phenomenology to Jay Bernstein’s Berkeley lecture series on the text. 28. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 64. 29. Hegel, Phenomenology, 66. 30. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 10. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 91 the demonstration that any internalised universal is already the product of an activity in relation to an external world.31 There is no nostalgia for previous relations to the world because each relation is fully sublated by the next. Nothing is lost from the self, because everything taken to be internal and ªxed is revealed to be external and transformable. For Wordsworth, feeling is internal; this is one of the basic premises of the “Ode.” Each person has an individual history of feeling, but that feeling is not reducible to the general progression of history. Or, in other words, what we feel becomes part of who we are. Hence nostalgia is possible. There is no clean sublation of infant experience in adult existence in Wordsworth as there is in the transition from Sense Certainty to Self Consciousness. Chandler is quite correct about the child’s dissatisfaction with infant experience (in other words, the poem’s nostalgia is neither total nor stable). Yet his conclusion is too Hegelian for Wordsworth. Chandler continues, “we are encouraged to read [‘endless imitation’] as a reference to poetic imitation, to mimesis in the Aristotelian sense.”32 The “progress” from infant to adult is, on this reading, a precondition of poetry, and thus implicitly advocated by the poem’s existence. Indeed, the speaker strays toward irony when he upbraids the child for his love of representation over sensation, when his speech is itself the engine of poesis. There is as much difªculty with Chandler’s reading of the “Ode” as a poem of progress as with the readings of decline he overcomes, however. Vendler rightly objects to the willful misreading necessary for Trilling’s claim that the poem “matures” into an entirely naturalistic second half.33 Similarly, Chandler must dismiss large (nostalgic) parts of the “Ode” as “false starts” in order to assert that the poem constitutes “sentimental progress.”34 This is the problematic “Hegelian” move: to assume that what is later fully overcomes and encompasses what is prior; the dialectic leaves no remainder. The problem is that adult “custom” is not the unequivocally positive substitute for infant “glory” that such a reading requires. As I have been arguing, it is not a substitute at all. To Chandler’s advantage, by the end of his essay, his question has changed to cultural progress, and the difªcult issue of human development has been elided. To underscore the problem, I turn back to Chandler’s discussion of the “Ode” in Wordsworth’s Second Nature. In his narrative, previous critics have overlooked the appeal of Burke to the young Wordsworth on a rhetorical 31. Matt Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 148. 32. Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode,” 144–45. 33. Vendler, “Lionel Trilling,” 28. 34. Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode,” 147, 152. 92 ALEXANDER FREER and aesthetic level. Thus Wordsworth’s turn to a Burkean political position on the Revolution, “somewhere between 1793 and 1818” was a return.35 A Burkean veneration of custom (sometimes ªgured as “second nature”) is detected by Chandler in practically the entire Wordsworthian corpus. To ªt the “Ode” into this narrative, Chandler designates the poem’s opposition to custom as “mistaken views” to be corrected by a “recovery” in these lines: O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers What was so fugitive!36 The seamless move from the evasive, “fugitive,” living feeling “that Nature yet remembers” to Chandler’s contention that it is remembered by “the force of habit” requires serious sleight of hand on Chandler’s part: he reads “custom with a weight” as “some part of ourselves [that] remains out of our own reach, beyond our intellectual tampering,” that relies instead on an understanding of life deep almost as custom.37 The selective reading Chandler is forced to do demonstrates how hard he must push against a poem whose parts “[stand] energetically in permanent contradiction.”38 If the speaker does come to embrace the “philosophic mind,” it is not because it marks a departure from earlier life, but because he recognizes that such philosophy will be precisely the “labor of the negative,” which afªrms life’s continuity through the ongoing relation with what has been lost. Even in “years that bring the philosophic mind,” there is no repudiation of beginnings (189). “The innocent brightness of a new-born Day / Is lovely yet” (197–98). 4 Language, as the symbolic relation of self to other, conªrms the loss of oceanic existence. “A word is elegy to what it signiªes,”39 and words are an elegy to the pure immediacy they foreclose. “Elegy” because words pay distant homage: their individual forms, the phonemes, stresses, and modulations, are complex derivations from an initial moment in which sound— tears, laughter, sheer noise—is the actualization of pure, unmediated affect. 35. James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 30. 36. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 79–80. 37. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 80–81. 38. Jeffrey C. Robinson, “The Immortality Ode: Lionel Trilling and Helen Vendler,” The Wordsworth Circle 12, no. 1 (1981): 69. 39. Hass, Praise, 4. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 93 The sense that words miss their objects is especially important in the “Ode” because the objects of early infant experience are only possible to describe through negation. On the reading I am suggesting, their existence as objects only emerges retroactively: from the “adult” perspective, which supposes the world to be composed of subjects and objects. This perspective is evident in the very assumption that affection cannot act intransitively, that a feeling always requires an object. The lost object emerges from our non-identity with what we were. “While we think of memory as an active faculty, we are rarely apt to consider it in its negative or premonitory form,” Sperry contends.40 Is a “negative memory” a memory at all? Can one forget, and yet by remembering that instance of forgetting, remain conscious of the thing that was forgotten? Sperry “seems at times to want Wordsworth to have it both ways.”41 I wonder if the “paradox” is made more difªcult than necessary by Sperry’s insistence on explaining the phenomenon through memory. In an early compositional fragment of The Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of “the time of unrememberable being.”42 If a notion of an “unrememberable” past persists in the “Ode,” too, it would explain how experiences could both pass away and remain present: there is experience that both affects us and exceeds our powers of memory. A “negative memory” could be better understood as the point at which memory’s limitation comes to the fore: the “Fallings from us, vanishings” which the “Ode” insists upon (146). Perhaps Sperry’s explanation is difªcult because “luminous traces engraved upon the memory” recall the Freudian vocabulary of the “memory trace.”43 Freud’s system requires a subsystem that keeps such traces concealed from consciousness. For Wordsworth, it is “ªrst affections” which persist. They would, therefore, be “shadowy” not because of repression, but because their objects emerge retroactively: in an unrememberable past at which they can only hint. Discussing sound in Wallace Stevens, Blasing writes: “we are alien to the language that produces us as subjects and unspeakably intimate with it. It speaks in our mouths.”44 To say that language produces the subject summons the sort of psychoanalysis with which Blasing claims disagreement; Lacan assigns just such extraordinary agency to language with his slogan: “a signiªer is what represents a subject to another signiªer.”45 But the claim holds for Blasing as well: as sounds, and as bodily articulations, words echo 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode,’” 44. Johnston, “Recollecting Forgetting,” 60. MS. JJ., reproduced in Wordsworth, The Prelude, 115. Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode,’” 48. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 138. Lacan, Écrits, 694. 94 ALEXANDER FREER the sensuous history of our becoming speaking beings. Language has forgotten or suppressed its original, emotional content, transforming from pure feeling into a system of signiªcation. Like Wordsworth, who realizes that the past never passes away entirely, Blasing suggests that in poetry we can ªnd the overlooked noise and difªculty of origins. Lyric Poetry is deeply Romantic in its own right. It pulls its poets (Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Sexton) back into their verse. Blasing’s readings long for what cannot be read, the inchoate and pre-poetic subjectivity, which is forever falling away in her studies into modernist intertextuality, language games, and personae. The difªculty of any programmatic attempt to read like this is palpable. The notion of an unconscious (be it Freudian repression or Wordsworthian “sleep and forgetting”) posits the same problem for comprehending psychological causality. Wordsworth makes the point elegantly: “Who that shall point as with a wand and say, / This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain?” (247–49). Just before The Prelude (1799, ªrst part) begins to trace the infant Babe’s origins with “best conjectures,” the speaker cautions that it is a Hard task to analyse a soul in which Not only general habits and desires But each most obvious and particular thought, Not in a mystical and idle sense But in the words of reason deeply weighed, Hath no beginning. (262–67) There is “no beginning,” the line about “the river of my mind” suggests, in the sense of speciªc origins. There is the scene of mother and infant, wordless, affective, and complex, and with obvious, deªnite origins, but not ones we could subdivide and “point [to] as with a wand.” And if we take the “Ode” at its word, the soul too has no earthly beginning, it “cometh from afar.” A criticism which may be leveled at Blasing’s theory is that its practical application is procedurally self-defeating. Any attempt to ªnd (and speak about) the residue of pre-language within language will end in performative contradiction; either you don’t ªnd what you were looking for, or worse, you do, and thus you must have missed the object entirely. Since language acquisition brings about the “history of forgetting,” in the end, our language is all we have left of it. The poem speaks, but because it does, it cannot speak of how it ever came to do so. In contrast to Blasing’s reading of Anne Sexton’s self-effacement, where “the unconscious and the ‘soul’ are being redeªned . . . as residual effects of the material medium training the body to its tune,” for Wordsworth residual effects are no epiphenomenon of language—the unconscious, spirit, WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 95 soul—these terms describe what in Wordsworth stretches back before words, before that split into self and other.46 If there is a “residual effect,” it is that the soul has been shaped by, and oriented towards, affection, even as the origins of the ªrst affections recede. Picking up Freud’s poetic term, W. R. Bion asks of analysis, “how is one to penetrate this obstacle, this caesura of birth?”47 In verse as much as in clinical analysis, the obstacle is not the absence of determination, but its surfeit. To take an example from a later couplet from the “Ode,” there are multiple layers of interpretation for a single syllable: And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Think not of any severing of our loves! (190–91) The “O” is a demand, a little prayer. It suggests the speaker’s unease with his previous insistence that “we will grieve not,” as he requests continued love. The cry functions as an invocation to nature, recalling the invocation to the Muses in poetic tradition. Metrically, in combination with the “and,” the “O” ensures the line scans as ªve iambs, and aligns it with the previous pentameter. It is also a kind of spoken caesura, a vowelsounded break before “ye Fountains” can do their work; it is the kind of break one might make if surprised and interrupted by a vision of the fountains and meadows. Not fountains and meadows as mere scenery, but as part of one’s own existence, an existence that now seems more and more independent (and lonely) with age, save for in occasional, glorious moments when nature still appears speechlessly wonderful: moments when we might say “O!” Wordsworth “will not acknowledge that the bond with nature—more psychic than epistemic—is broken,” Hartman writes.48 The “O” makes a temporal break before the fountains, but also reinforces the psychological break that has occurred: just as the mother’s touch is only possible because of the child’s estrangement: the line itself is premised on its own alienation from nature. It speaks to the severance it is pleading against. There is a tragic sense that loss has already occurred, and every poetic effort to prevent it only makes it worse. Insofar as these lines protest against the immovable, they recall the aggrieved mother in “The Thorn,” Martha Ray, whose repeated cry Peter McDonald calls “the poem’s most secure fact”: “Oh misery! Oh misery / O woe is me! Oh misery!”49 46. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 190. 47. Bion, Two Papers: “The Grid” and “Caesura” (London: Karnac, 1989), 45, my emphasis. 48. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 160. 49. McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 63. 96 ALEXANDER FREER The language of the “Ode” speaks to both the impossibility of reading origins with any sense of ªnality, and the necessity of doing so nevertheless, for in that “O” remains the intimation of “shadowy” affection “[w]hich neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, / Nor Man nor Boy, / Nor all that is at enmity with joy, / Can utterly abolish or destroy!” (160–63). If we allow that origins stretch back further than language, there is another way to ªgure poetic overdetermination, however: not as a failure to signify clearly, but as a special capacity to hold multiple (and sometimes antagonistic) meanings together—to connect present and absent things. Temporal and visual breaks invite our anticipation; lines murmur their tonal and rhythmic imitations of one another; a syllable’s multiple suggestions hang in the air: there are moments when all these intimations seem as solid as valleys and trees. Rather than posing a problem, such effects offer a solution; only because a poem’s possibilities exceed conscious and determinate comprehension can it “be the dream of which we are the sleep.”50 The Wordsworthian soul, with all its affective intensity, is not, like Sexton’s, a linguistic ghost. Its work, its evidence, if souls can have evidence, is in the singular moments of beauty and shock that recall a time when “every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light.” That these moments can recur in adult life suggests that there has been no “severing of our loves.” These moments recur for Wordsworth’s own characters. They demonstrate the same excessive perception, becoming ªxated or overcome by simple objects. Mark Hewson points to the “distinctive gesture that reappears in a number of Wordsworth’s narrative poems . . . the description of an isolated, unremarkable, even dismal object.” We might think of Martha Ray’s thorn, Simon Lee’s mattock, and the heap of stones in “Michael.”51 So too in the “Ode,” objects which “should” seem trivial or straightforward are sometimes overpowering. The meanest ºower can signify more than is expressible. The feeling is unexplainable because the “glorious” scene it recalls and draws upon is unrememberable. We encounter what Erik Gray calls “the trope of exceptionality”: the act of marking out or excluding a single instance from the common. He contends: The trope very neatly combines two great Romantic preoccupations: detailed observation of nature and sympathy with natural phenomena (since the solitary poet is implicitly equated with the exceptional bird 50. Henri Meschonnic, “Rhyme and Life,” trans. Gabriella Bedetti, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 90. 51. Hewson, “The Scene of Meditation in Wordsworth,” Modern Language Review 106, no. 4 (2011): 954. WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y 97 or beetle or breeze); and imaginative expansion—the mind’s ability, in the absence of sensory information, to ªgure forth an alternate world.52 It is no surprise, then, that in Chandler’s reading of the “Ode,” he misses the strange exceptionality or haecceity of the pansy, subsuming its aura in the “depth” of custom, stretching his deªnition of custom (now seemingly responsible for things we cannot share and repeat) in the process. The “Ode” proposes a distinct, psychological reading of origins, one that is both affectively rich and also subject to a form of Romantic deferral. Origins always slip away from us in the last analysis because part of thinking about origins is acknowledging their disappearance. The “Ode” suggests what we might call a Wordsworthian unconscious, one of “sleep and forgetting,” composed not of repressed representations, but lost affects. But if the lost object of infant experience conªrms our estrangement from our past, its gentle or forceful after-shocks conªrm our lingering connection. The “almost physical continuity” is found not in memories, but in the moments when memory lacks explanatory capacity: in disproportionate and unexplainable reactions to particular objects and in the ongoing sensitivity of the soul to the emergence of those powerful feelings that also seem to “cometh from afar.” Present feelings echo the ªrst feelings which, although shadowy and incomprehensible, “Are yet the fountain light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing” (154–55). They hint at a world before ours precisely because they appear as unrememberable gaps and lost objects. 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