The Supplement of Reading

Front matter

PRACTICE

FIGURES OF UNDERSTANDING IN ROMANTIC THEORY AND ROAR a

Tilottama Rajan

Part II

A. Reading, Culture, History

. The (Un)Persuaded Reader: Coleridge’s Conversation with

Hermeneutics

. The Eye/I of the Other: Self and Audience in Wordsworth’s

Lyrical Ballads

. Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the

Political Novel

B. Canon and Heresy: Blake’s Intertextuality

. Untying Blake’s Secular Scripture . Early Texts: “The Eye Altering Alters All” . (Infinite) Absolute Negativity: The Brief Epics

Vv

Vil

101 136

197 221 vi Contents

C. Deconstruction at the Scene of Its Reading

10. “World within World”: The Theoretical Voices of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry

11. Deconstruction or Reconstruction: Reading Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound

12. The Broken Mirror: The Identity of the Text in Shelley’s Triumph of Life

Afterword Index

277 298 323

350 355

Acknowledgments hapter 1, “The Supplement of Reading,” appeared in a slightly

different form in New Literary History 17 (1985—86): 573-94. Chapter 6, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” appeared in Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988): 22—51. Chapter 11, “Deconstruction or Reconstruction: Reading Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,” also appeared in a slightly different form in SiR 23 (1984): 317- 38. Parts of Chapter 2, in an earlier form, are appearing under the title “Representation and Self-Representation: The Canonical Hermeneutics of Hegel and Kierkegaard,” in Parabasis V, ed. Michel Bareau (Edmonton: Alta Press, 1990).

This book was begun with the aid of a leave fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during 1984-85, partially supplemented by Queen’s University. It was completed with the help of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation during 1988 and the generous support of the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Travel grants from the American Council of Learned Societies as well as from the graduate schools of Queen’s University and the University of Wisconsin enabled me to do the necessary work in manuscript collections. None of this would have been possible without the generous professional support of several colleagues, whose own work has likewise been a continuing source of stimulation to me: Geoffrey Hartman, Jerome McGann, Hillis Miller, Robert Essick, Stuart Curran, Leopold Damrosch, Frederick Garber, Milton Wilson, and Ross Woodman. I am also grateful to the following libraries for allowing me to look at manuscript material by Blake and Shelley: the Bodleian Library, the Prints and Drawings Collection of the British Museum, the vii viii Acknowledgments

Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, the Pierpoint Morgan Library, the Yale Centre for British Art, and the Beinecke Library. My thanks are due to Kathy Dauck and Barb Bosold, who have wrestled valiantly with the Infernal Machine and its attempts to transform this book into experimental fiction.

David Clark and Ross Woodman have read virtually all of this book at some stage of its composition, and I am particularly grateful for their careful and always sympathetic criticism. Without the many conversations I have had with David Clark, my thinking on Blake would not have got to where it is, and I owe him a debt that cannot be adequately registered in a footnote. The chapter on the conversation poems likewise germinated, appropriately enough, in conversations with Ross Woodman. But I must also thank him in ways that cannot easily be articulated, for his special sensitivity to the connection between academic and emotional support, and for his understanding of how one’s life is part of one’s ideas. To my parents, who have supported me in ways that go beyond the academic and who have thus made it easier for me to work productively, I also owe a profound debt. Finally my most unusual debt is to four very special squirrels: to Tangerina, Chloe, and most of all to Twinkle and her daughter Periwinkle. They have helped me to relearn the language of romanticism, which had once seemed to me an object of critique only, and to understand the deeply hermeneutic nature of the relationship to the other. For they have wanted to communicate despite the absence of a spoken language, and if I have sought the illusory immediacy of speech, their choice of gesture and mime has told me that they know understanding to be by signs only. Sharing some of their life with me, they have not shared their death. But they have allowed their death to be signified, by a child or by a sister, so that the silence and solitude of their absence would not be vacancy.

TILOTTAMA RAJAN Madison, Wisconsin

GL

HK

Frequently Cited Texts and Abbreviations

G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.

F. W. J. Schelling. The Ages of the World. Trans. F. de Wolfe Bolman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1907.

Søren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Irony. Trans. Lee M. Capel. 1965; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.

Søren Kierkegaard. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941.

William Godwin. Caleb Williams or Things as They Are. Ed. David Mc- Cracken. New York: Norton, 1977.

William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman, with commentary by Harold Bloom. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. (In citations in the text the abbreviation ‘E’ is followed first by the page number; the numbers following the semicolon indicate the plates and lines. Page numbers only are used to cite very brief texts.)

Friedrich Schleiermacher. A Critical Essay on the Gospel of Saint Luke. Trans. Connop Thirlwall. London: John Taylor, 1825.

Friedrich Schleiermacher. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Ed. Heinz Kimmerle. Trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars’ Press, 1977.

ix x Texts and Abbreviations

IDP Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher’s Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato. Trans. William Dobson. Cambridge: J. J. Deighton, 1836.

LB William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads:

The Text of the 1798 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces. Ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Methuen, 1968. LJ Friedrich Schleiermacher. The Life of Jesus. Ed. Jack Verheyden. Trans. S. Maclean Gilmour. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. MWW Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Ed. James Kinsley and Gary Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. O Friedrich Schleiermacher. “The Hermeneutics: The Outline of the 1819 Lectures.” Trans. Jan Wocjik and Roland Haas. New Literary History 10 (1978): 1—16.

P William Wordsworth. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979 (quotations from 1850 version).

PM G. W. F. Hegel. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. Revised ed., 1931. Rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

PV Søren Kierkegaard. The Point of View for My Work as an Author. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

SPP Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977.

St.L. William Godwin. Travels of St. Leon. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831.

STC Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912.

Introduction he impetus for this book lies in a sense of dissatisfaction with my

own previous work on the problem of representation, of making present, in romantic literature.! Deconstruction, even when it takes a psychological or phenomenological form and does not abolish the desire for reference by reducing consciousness to a mere ghost in the machine of language, has remained a postformalist mode, at least on this continent.2 While it does not attribute a self-identical meaning to the text, the dissemination of meaning is something that happens ‘inside’ the text and not also between the text and history or the text and its readers. Any move to include the ‘outside’ of the text is unlikely to transcend deconstruction, for history and the text’s readers are themselves involved in textual processes. Or put differently, outside and inside are not so much opposite as diacritical terms. But dissemination implies both scattering and communication, and to consider the latter is to reinscribe the

Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980).

2I am assuming here that ‘deconstruction’ is a broader term than ‘poststructuralism,’ which is only its most recent manifestation. Characteristic of all varieties of deconstruction are the dismantling of binary oppositions and the finding of subtexts within texts. But deconstruction, as pioneered by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, historically predates the structuralist emphasis on the purely linguistic nature of the subject. It is thus possible to conceive of a deconstruction that is postorganicist rather than poststructuralist and that does not make consciousness into a mere effect of language. My own previous work is deconstructive in this way, as is the early work of Paul de Man. For a more detailed discussion of this subject see my articles “Displacing Post-Structuralism: Criticism of the Romantics after Paul de Man,” Studies in Romanticism 24 (1985): 451—74, and “The Future of Deconstruction in Romantic Studies,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 11, no. 2 (1987):

131-47.

affective and referential aspects of literature. To consider the outside of the text is correspondingly to see how texts produce meanings, but in the sense of ‘producing’ something as in a play, or ‘producing’ something that participates in an economy and therefore a system of representation.

In focusing on the role of the reader in romantic theory and practice, I suggest that the assumptions of the period often preclude consideration of a text purely in terms of its internal relations. But an inquiry into the outside can take several forms, and this study is concerned with the ‘outside of the text,’ rather than with the material documentation of what is outside the text. More specifically, it explores the recourse to the ‘supplement of reading’ as a way of reconstructing a written text unable to achieve identity with itself into the ideal totality of the work.? The pressures of derealization in romantic texts often coexist with a strongly affirmative conception that invites the reader to bridge the gap between conception and execution, and to supply a unity not present in the text. As if to insure our cooperation, the romantic text often makes the appropriate reader a part of its rhetoric, as in Coleridge’s conversation poems, which address themselves to a kindred spirit who must suspend the disbelief into which the poems themselves wander. The deferral of achieved meaning from the text to its reading finds a critical parallel in the rise of hermeneutics: broadly speaking, the theory of interpretation, but in this context the increasingly ‘psychological’ rather than exegetical form it takes as meaning is located in a creative consciousness behind the text. Superficially, hermeneutics may resemble the rhetorical criticism of Samuel Johnson or Horace in its focus on the reader. But Johnson conceives of the reader as recipient rather than supplement: it is the text that must persuade the reader, and not the reader who must complete the text. At the same time, the supplement of reading is also a highly problematic concept. As in the case of a supplement to an encyclopedia, the need for it points to a gap in the written text even as it fills it. Moreover, in transforming the reader from recipient to supplement, the author renounces his authority over the reader. Actual readers do not necessarily follow the roles prescribed for them within texts or by culturally limited critical conventions. Texts exist within the circuit of communication, and their ‘intentions’ are often displaced by an awareness of such readers, which puts authors themselves in the position of interpreters rather than prophets.

Though there has been no systematic study of the subject, attention to

3I borrow this distinction from Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 155-64. The distinction is of course critical rather than real.

the role of the reader in romantic aesthetics is by no means new. Kathleen Wheeler cites Jean Paul’s notion that the author provides an outline which the reader is to fill in creatively.* Similarly, David Welberry writes, “Romantic hermeneutics is a model of understanding as the re-cognition of the sponsoring spiritual source of a work.”> Over the years there have been discussions of individual texts that focus on their rhetoric or their construction of an implied reader. Many of these earlier studies assume a work that can be reconstructed from the text and are reluctant to explore how problematic a recuperative hermeneutic can be in the texts themselves.6 More recently, Jerome McGann has drawn attention to the need to situate hermeneutics itself, and others have begun to explore the interpretive fluidity created by the interchanging of writer and reader.” The early studies, however, remain valuable in articulating paradigms that enter romantic texts on the level of desire (even granted that desire is itself a representation rather than a moment of consciousness prior to language). Or to put it differently, the models developed in traditional hermeneutics simply recognize explicitly the strategies of supplementation often assumed by modern scholarship. Thus Northrop Frye reads Blake in terms of a canonical hermeneutic that reinterprets the early poems according to the later ‘system.’ And editorial projects like “Shelley and his Circle” draw on a romantic linkage between philology and organicism to contextualize texts in their author’s literary life. Building dialogically on both the studies stimulated by contemporary theory and those that precede it, this book looks at how the activity of reading is

4Kathleen Wheeler, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 11—15.

5“E. T. A. Hoffmann and Romantic Hermeneutics: An Interpretation of Hoffmann’s ‘Don Juan,” Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 455.

6Examples include Michael G. Cooke, “The Mode of Argument in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 185—215; Jerome McGann, “The Aim of Blake’s Prophecies and the Uses of Blake Criticism,” in Stuart Curran and Joseph Wittreich, eds., Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on the“Four Zoas,” “Milton,” “Jerusalem” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 3-21; Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); E. S. Shaffer, ’Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). A highly complex version of this approach, one that reconstructs a traditional hermeneutic across the theoretical abyss introduced by the sublime, is Vincent de Luca’s “A Wall of Words: The Sublime as Text,” in Nelson Hilton and Thomas Vogler, eds., Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 218-41.

“The Ancient Mariner: The Meaning of Meanings,” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 135—72. See also Jean-Pierre Mileur, Vision and Revision: Coleridge’s Art of Immanence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Donald Ault, “Re-Visioning The Four Zoas,” in Hilton and Vogler, eds., Unnam’d Forms, pp. 105—40; William Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

narrated in a wide range of romantic texts and how the role of the reader is projected and complicated by romantic theory itself.

Making the reader a constituent of the text, as H. R. Jauss’s studies of medieval literature suggest, is not unique to romantic literature.8 What may be unique is the manner in which this move is theorized into a crisis in signification by developments in romantic hermeneutics that both reflect and influence the organization of texts. The result is an increasingly metafictional literature that makes theory a subject of reflection within the text itself. This book therefore falls into two parts. The first part reconstructs romantic concepts of reading from German theories about the relationship among expression, communication, and understanding. The decision to focus on English romantic texts but to develop a historically grounded framework for their analysis from German theory of the period is probably no longer something that needs to be defended. Because English criticism remains empirical while German literary theory forms part of an encyclopedic philosophic project, we can expect the latter to develop explicitly theories of interpretation that are less systematically present in the criticism of the English romantics. I use the term ‘traditional hermeneutics’ to indicate an initial romantic position on reading: one committed to F. A. Wolf’s definition of hermeneutics as the art of grasping the “thoughts of another person . . . just as he has grasped them himself.”9 But this definition by no means sums up perceptions about reading. Hence, the second part of this study concentrates on romantic writers at the point where they begin to reflect upon traditional hermeneutics in scenes of reading that often textualize their own theoretical assumptions. The fact that the literature questions as well as enacts a traditional hermeneutic means that some of the theoretical writings examined in the first part are read against the grain, so as to uncover those aporias in them that result in their emerging as problematic in romantic practice. But these writings, too, are self-interrogating, and in the course of the period the hermeneutic theory of reading rewrites itself as a ‘heuristic’ theory that displaces but does not entirely dismantle the former. It is important to recognize that this development takes place within hermeneutics itself. Poststructuralism has accustomed us to an ahistorical and prescriptive use of terms like ‘hermeneutics,’ ‘phenomenology,’ and ‘philology,’ which associates them with a naive metaphysics of presence. But the meaning of these terms is not fixed, and if they are used historically to describe a series of writers who em-

8“Theses on the Transition from the Aesthetics of Literary Works to a Theory of Aesthetic Experience,” in Mario J. Valdes and Owen J. Miller, eds., Interpretation of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 145-47.

Quoted by Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 146-47.

ploy them rather than to describe a normative position, they emerge as far more complex, indeed, self-revising.

They also revise our own critical map. In looking at romantic texts in the light of a nineteenth-century aesthetics re-visioned in contemporary terms, this study attempts a kind of new literary history. New literary history is not simply the reinscription of a history-of-ideas criticism as ‘theory, according to a genetic logic that makes the former an embryonic version of the latter. It is also a reinscription of theory in the history of ideas that configured theory differently. The first chapter discusses the problems presented by the supplement of reading. It distinguishes in the abstract two varieties of recuperative reading: a positive hermeneutic that synthesizes the text by arranging and expanding elements actually given in it, and a negative hermeneutic in which the act of reading supplies something absent from and in contradiction to the textual surface. These attempts to ground meaning through interpretation are increasingly self-undermining and lead to a heuristic theory of the text as a stimulus for the production of meanings that cannot entirely be fixed. Subsequent chapters trace the directions taken by theories of reading in the romantic period itself. The second chapter begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose notion that a “grammatical” reading of the text needs to be complemented by a “psychological” reading that grasps the wholeness of the work provides a model for the positive hermeneutic earlier described. Hegel extends this tradition so as to expand a purely literary hermeneutics into an ontological hermeneutics but also renders it deeply problematic by making interpretation projective and teleological rather than reconstructive. In the work of Jean Paul and the later Schelling we find models for a negative hermeneutic that increasingly identifies meaning with what is not said, deferring it to the imaginary. Finally, in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony a hermeneutics of absence is staged, so as to bring out both the insistence of the desire for meaning that motivates it, and the tenuousness of the meaning so constructed. In moving from Schleiermacher to Kierkegaard, I try to bring out the paradox of romantic hermeneutics, as a movement that simultaneously initiates and masks the deconstruction of representation and ultimately unweaves its own recuperative strategies. I also see an emergent awareness of this paradox on the part of the theorists.

The third chapter therefore examines the reconception of hermeneutics as it emerges from the later work of Schleiermacher and from Kierkegaard’s Point of View for My Work as an Author, where the relationship between reading and authority is a constant concern. One of the more puzzling aspects of this study may well be the way Schleiermacher surfaces as protagonist of two narratives about hermeneutics: a traditional and a revisionary narrative. That is because it is extremely difficult to identify him with a single position without distorting his work. Positions that have now become hypostatized as schools intertwine in the more fluid context of romanticism, with its emphasis on (critical) texts as unfinished processes, on textuality as intertextuality. Because this earlier theoretical terrain is, to adapt Shelley, like the “chaos of acyclic poem,” it can be mapped in more than one way. For a long time our perception of Schleiermacher has been mediated by Wilhelm Dilthey, and he has been associated with what Hans-Georg Gadamer brands a false romanticism of immediacy.!° This Schleiermacher is treated in the second chapter and is as much a historically true figure as any other ‘Schleiermacher, because the text of a certain strain in romantic hermeneutics writes itself around him. The simultaneously deconstructive and phenomenological Schleiermacher discussed in the third chapter is similarly a ‘historical figure, in the double sense that he is not an imaginary construction but is at the same time a ‘figure,’ produced through the intertextual inscription of contemporary theory in an earlier critical discourse.

The inclusion in this section of philosophers like Hegel and Schelling, who are concerned with understanding but not strictly with literary hermeneutics, may seem more unorthodox to the critic than to the philosopher. It has, nevertheless, a historical sanction from Dilthey who, in his biography of Schleiermacher, relates the latter’s theory of reading to post-Kantian idealism and even to Goethe’s work in botany and anatomy. Describing how Goethe explains metamorphosis and difference in organisms as part of a uniform structure, Dilthey sees the organic hypothesis as yielding principles for the interpretation of parts that do not initially appear to fit into a whole.!! Following Dilthey, who sees a parallel between the reading of nature and the reading of texts, I extrapolate from Hegel and Schelling principles that can apply to the reading of texts as well as the interpretation of Being. Thus Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind attempts something like the anagogic level of exegesis in the medieval theory: namely, a reading of history that will recomprehend individual events in the light of the entire history of mind. From it we can extrapolate a ‘canonical’ hermeneutics, which rereads the individual text in relation both to the author’s oeuvre and to a world-historical poem that is still unfolding.

Writers like Blake, Wordsworth, or Coleridge, who either created or planned a magnum opus, used the canon as a figure of reading in their texts. But such figures always prove self-complicating, and the second part of this book is concerned with what happens to them when they are

10Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 164-69. 11“The Schleiermacher Biography,” Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 61-62. See pp. 46—67 in general.

inscribed in literary texts and opened up to the intertextual processes of reading. These chapters therefore do not follow the ‘narrative’ of the first part by tracing an evolution from texts that encode a positive hermeneutic, through ones whose strategies of recuperation are more dubious, to texts that abandon interpretive closure. To approach the texts purely in terms of the traditional models would now be redundant, in that it would restate in a rhetorical rather than thematic vocabulary existing interpretations tacitly informed by hermeneutic paradigms. But it is also one of my contentions that texts become problematic at the point where they raise the question of their own reading. Those texts that ask to be read on a hermeneutic as well as a mimetic level inevitably function at a reflexive level as well, inscribing rather than exemplifying the traditional models. We can make a schematic distinction between ‘hermeneutic’ texts uneasily committed to their recuperative strategies and texts that incorporate these strategies in more self-critical ways. But all the texts considered in the second part are effectively or intentionally open to some degree of heuristic reading. Or to put it differently, a study of romantic theory may locate the models in an approximately historical sequence. But it is more difficult to fit authors or even texts into a genetic narrative that allows the traditional models an untroubled, if temporary, identity as stages in an individual or historical evolution.

Accordingly, these chapters explore the presence of the traditional models in various texts but treat them as already under erasure. Chapter 4 discusses how the psychological subtext of Coleridge’s conversation poems displaces their attempt to model a decorum of reading drawn from positive hermeneutics. These poems are ‘hermeneutic texts still committed to what they render problematic. Less reluctantly reflexive, Prometheus Unbound (the subject of Chapter 11) articulates a positive hermeneutic in the dialogue between Asia and Panthea, questions it in the dialogue with Demogorgon, and tenuously reinscribes it through its use of the performative mode of drama. Chapter 6 looks at how the fragmentary status of Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman both encourages and limits the text’s plea to be read through a hermeneutics of reversal. It then considers how Godwin, in his revision of Caleb Williams, reflects upon this hermeneutic, which the first version had invoked as a supplement to its unhappy ending. The chapters on Blake again include texts such as Urizen and Europe that can be read in terms of a negative hermeneutic but consider how such readings are displaced by the intertextual aesthetic of the early work. Moreover, the models do not constitute a series of positions that authors go through in a certain order. Blake returns in his later work to a theoretically ‘earlier’ hermeneutic. His development is an exception to any claim about a historical movement from ‘hermeneutic’ to ‘heuristic’ texts. But his simultaneous reprinting of early poems that are what Barthes describes as ‘writerly’ texts!2 also problematizes any cultural authority he reclaims by returning to more traditional figures of understanding.

The second part, then, is not concerned with ‘pure’ forms of the traditional models. If they occur anywhere in English romanticism, it may be in theoretical writings by the authors considered. Accordingly, the sixth chapter discusses an essay in which Godwin elaborates a divinatory hermeneutics, and Chapter 5, on Wordsworth, begins with the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, which expands poetics into hermeneutics so as to make language part of a project of cross-cultural understanding. But classifying something as ‘theory’ rather than ‘text’ is itself a critical choice, and the blurring of the line between the two parts of this study through the inclusion of theory in the sections on texts is meant to qualify any metadiscursive authority the various models may have acquired in the first part. Thus, Chapter 4 approaches Coleridge’s theory of reading not through his biblical writings but through the Biographia considered as a narrative, which generates asymmetries between authority and its reading that are paralleled in the conversation poems. More unusually, the chapters on Blake use texts as sources of theory and treat Milton and The Marriage as contrasting theories of reading. The textualizing of theory is the particular concern of Chapter 10, which looks at Shelley’s Defence as composed by different theoretical ‘voices,’ at the relationship of supplementation and displacement between these voices, and at the intertextual relationship between the essay and its subsequent readers.

As these comments indicate, whereas chapters in the first part are stages in an argument, those in the second part consider an array of intersecting problems. Thus, the tripartite subdivision of this section is itself a heuristic schema and picks out issues by no means confined to the chapters in which they are given titular attention. These issues include ones that lie dormant in the hermeneutic tradition, such as the relationship among reading, history, and culture. The concept of divinatory reading projects the text into history so as to make reading the means to its future empowerment. But there is little sense of history as a site of rereading, though it seems implicit in the idea that texts are still in process. The chapter on the political novel therefore explores the incorporation of hermeneutics into a revolutionary aesthetic whose romanticism itself becomes subject to reflection. As important are issues of cultural difference bracketed by a tradition that believes in a common human nature, yet raised by the very format of Dilthey’s essay on hermeneutics, as a critical history in which romantic hermeneutics is situated

12Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 3—4.

as a specifically post-Kantian form of interpretation. The chapters on Wordsworth and Coleridge thus take up the dialogizing of hermeneutics that occurs in texts where the romantic ideology is culturally situated. Built around his differences from the Wordsworth circle, Coleridge’s conversation poems model reading as a transcendence of difference, but raise the issue of what Gadamer calls “prejudice” as a way of historicizing authority. By using the heteroglossic form of the collection, the Lyrical Ballads more explicitly question their attempt to make literature part of a social hermeneutic. The section on Blake, necessarily extensive because its subject is the Blake canon, deals with the politics of ‘canonization’ and with the early Blake’s development of a counterhermeneutic sensitive to the imperialism of canonical reading. These chapters all recognize the challenge posed to the conservatism of hermeneutics by the text’s insertion into shifting cultural contexts. But they also see reading itself as generating an intertextuality that produces this insertion. They therefore mediate between hermeneutics and various forms of cultural critique. The final chapter, by contrast, tries to mediate between hermeneutics and deconstruction. Focusing on what has become an exemplary text for the deconstruction of reading, it suggests that The Triumph of Life cannot be reduced to a manuscript that proves unreadable, just as the possibility of reading cannot be judged according to the still formalist criterion of whether we can arrive at an interpretation. Rather, the work, like the procession that includes not just Life but her participants, is constituted by the ongoing intertextual transactions between manuscripts, reading texts, and readers.