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Forget Revolution:
Tim Feng-shan Tsai
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| 1. |
Given their
historically overdetermined topical interest, it is difficult not to read
John Keatss
Hyperion: A Fragment
and
The Fall of Hyperion: A
Dream
in relation to the French Revolution and its aftermath. For many
critics, however, the two fragments constitute Keatss allegorical
disavowal of political revolution, in the name of a poetical one. Ronald
Paulson, for example, asserts that Keats associates the process of
revolution with the movement from sublime to beautiful. Political
revolution, according to this reading, becomes the model for [Keats's]
own projected revolution in writing poetry.
{2}
Alan J. Bewell, on
the other hand, reads in Hyperion Keats's ambivalent attitude toward the
liberal ideology of progress as represented by Napoleon Bonaparte.
{3}
Both Paulson and Bewell, however, feel the need to distance Keats from
serious commitment to revolutionary politics, and their readings of the
fragment tend to aestheticize Keats's politics by giving full credit to
Oceanus assertion that first in beauty should be first in might.
{4}
For Bewell, such an assertion rewrites political revolution in
non-violent, aesthetic terms.
{5}
For Paulson, only Oceanus sees that
the innocence of [the Titans] existence required the revolution that
transforms beauty into sublimity, and that this will in turn lead to a
higher form of beauty-through-knowledge.
{6}
Oceanus, in fact, forgets
himself when he makes that statement, a fact which most critics tend to
forget or repress, and to which I will return later.
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| 2. |
What Paulson reads as
a dialectical movement becomes the cyclical action in Marilyn
Butler, who observes that Keats is far from welcoming revolution like a
nineteenth-century progressive. It becomes, instead, an allegory of
life: The cyclical action of Hyperion expresses the necessitarian
truth, that life is change and must embrace change in all its forms,
including defeat and death.
{7}
Such an interpretation is all the more
striking in that it comes immediately after a longish quotation from
Keatss September 18, 1819 letter to George and Georgiana, in which
Keats does expound, however jejunely, a dialectical view of the
Revolution. Critics, it seems, either try to pull the political tooth out
of Keats or flatly deny that he has one at all. As a result, they tend to
either aestheticize his politics or politicize his aesthetic performance
and see it as wanting. Take Bewell once more for example. His reading of
Hyperion
is predicated on the assumption that Keats began writing the poem with
the intention of adopting not only an Enlightenment genre, but also a
political ideology. But, failing to find an adequate language for
Apollo, Keats is said to experience discomfort not only with that
ideology but with the language of that genre as well. Keatss career in
poetry thereafter seeks therefore to deal with his sense that he is,
perhaps, as much an outsider in politics as he was in poetry.
{8}
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| 3. |
Bewell's reading is
well received by Marjorie Levinson, who sees Keats as living a life of
allegory, an allegory in which Keats's self-fashioning overcomes his
drawbacks in terms of class, literary, and sexual politics. What Bewell
calls Napoleonic allusion becomes in Levinson Napoleonic
inscription, by which she reads
Hyperion
as an allegory of
legitimacy. Hyperion, the Sun God, she writes, looks very much
like an inscription of that symbol of a more recent and occidental old
order: Louis Quatorze / Quainze. In Keatss Apollo, she reads a
Napoleonic inscription, the phonetic resemblance (Apol-Napol) motivated
by a narrative gesture.
{9}
Inscriptions are readable, provided the memory
such a reading draws on is not lost, and Levinsons reading of the
inscriptions is legitimate insofar as we are willing to make some
allowance for the historical telescoping such a reading demands. (After
all, Napoleon, committing anachronism, did equate himself with the
revolution that saw the fall of the Sun Kings head.) Still, there
remains the legal problem of usurpation both the Titans and Olympians have
committed. And heres Levinsons solution:
Thus, Levinson converts a potential political radical into an intentional sympathizer of the ancien regime , using what she calls a post-structuralist method to interpret the ages dominant structures of feeling: the ideological subject-forms underlying its diverse political positions. {11} Theoretical trappings notwithstanding, Levinson's reading agrees with the authority of the critics discussed earlier. Like them, she is more interested in defending the received notion that Keats lived in the felicitous marriage of beauty and truth, even if he had to forge that poetic identity for himself. Like them, too, she falls back on imperative categories such as historical necessity and natural law, which are based in fact on Oceanus questionable authority. Questionable, because Oceanus is forgetful, and hence content with the status quo , namely, the Titans statue-like existence. And Levinson forgets that Oceanus forgets the revolution that fells the Titans. But such is the surprising effect of sympathy. As Oceanus identifies with Neptune, so does Levinson identify with the Titans. Like the other critics, Levinson feels so much for the Titans as to give a multi-layered transferential reading: "Keats would have us identify Saturn with the narrator of Hyperion. {12} With transference, one enters an uncertain terrain. For it is no longer sure where to locate the structures of feeling or to what extent what she calls Keatss subjectivity or subject-form is a matter of style or the effect of a critics transference. {13} But, taking sides with the Titans, she certainly takes Keats's politics too lightly.
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| 4. |
Instead of the
structures of feeling, we should probably address the structure of
transference, of reading, and of transferential reading in which what one
says about the text says perhaps as much about the texture of his or her
own subjectivity. Rather than a method of reading, such a prerequisite is
a reminder that the most innovative of our reading is more often than not
the result of our enabling ignorance. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is
what Barbara Johnson states, in Nothing Fails Like Success, as a
categorical imperative that we must keep forgetting what we know how to
do.
{14}
With characteristic lucidity and economy, she denounces the
institutionalization of deconstruction on the one hand and, on the other,
defends deconstruction against charges from the literarily conservative
and the politically radical. Against the former, she highlights the
"other" logic of deconstruction that seeks to subvert the
either/or logic of binary opposition. One of the examples she gives is the
opposition between the objectivity and subjectivity of the act of reading:
Deconstruction, that is, seeks to question the boundary lines between objectivity and subjectivity or between object and subject. Johnsons defense against the politically radical is that, as a discourse based on the questioning of boundary lines, deconstruction must never stop questioning its own. {16}
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| 5. |
In other words, it
must question the limits of the literary text. The question, for
her, is how to use history and biography
deconstructively
, how
to seek in them not answers, causes, explanations, or origins, but new
questions and new ways in which the literary and nonliterary texts alike
can be made to read and rework each other.
{17}
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| 6. |
Johnson, in fact,
still argues from within the limits of the literary text, although the
limits are pushed back to include what has supposedly been foreclosed by
New Criticism. She still maintains some implied borderlines between
literary discourse and a somewhat narrowly defined politics, for which, as
both Bewell and Levinson argue, one needs to adopt an adequate and proper
language, or at least a parody of that language. Consequently, her ethics
of reading seems to sidestep the issue raised by
politically
radical critics like Terry Eagleton, who faults Paul de Man for an
unremitting hostility to the practice of political emancipation.
{18}
Johnson fails, in short, to demonstrate that the act of reading knows no
boundary, not only between literary and historical, but also between
literary and political, discourse. Nevertheless, her ethical imperative of
forgetful reading can indeed be invoked against Eagletons political
demand for emancipation. Like Levinsons post-structuralist method,
Eagletons accusation against de Man is predicated on a forgetting, not
of what one knows
how
to do, but of
what
one knows how to
do. There is, of course, a world of difference between
how
and
what
.
For, in a remarkable flash of hindsight, Eagleton (like Diderot) conflates
by the name de Man uncle and nephew, and that, too, in the name of
emancipation. All these allegories of forgetting, as we shall see, are
prefigured by Keats's
Hyperion: A Fragment
and
The Fall of
Hyperion: A Dream
, in which the act of reading is explicitly posited
as a political act. As a political act, reading is potent when aided by,
but vulnerable in the absence of, memory. The possibility and
impossibility of reading is founded precisely on its fragile tie with
memory, namely, with the constant threat of the loss of memory, a loss
that mourning seeks to overcome. Reading is prone to error because writing
tends to decompose into mere figures, inscriptions, or memory traces,
which are the material base of language. To the extent that, for Keats,
the act of reading has revolutionary consequences, such ambiguity of
reading is also inherent in the notion of revolution: namely, between the
sense of overturning and return,
{19}
between the revolution that
saw the fall of the Sun-King and the
revolution
that is the
rhythm of a suns course,
{20}
between the possibility and impossibility
of revolution as critics of a politically radical denomination would read
it.
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| 7. |
Allegory,
Christopher Norris writes in his explication of Paul de Mans essay on
Pascal, involves a perpetual suspension of meaning, a detour through
the various tropes, figures, and modes of oblique signification where
language can never reach the point of simply saying what it set out to
say.
{21}
In light of the fact that Keatss fragments have more to say
about
reading than most of their critics would countenance, I will proceed to
read them, the fragments, as first and foremost an allegory of reading.
There is something so chrematistic about the economy of the fragment form
that one is tempted to think that nothing succeeds like failure. And it is
doubly tempting when one failure succeeds another, as is the case
with Keats's
Hyperion: A Fragment
and
The Fall of Hyperion: A
Dream
, which capitalize on our deep-lying need for a sense of
totality. As fragments, they are highly productive, on the one hand, of
totalizing readings that seek to fit them into the grand design of
literary and political history; and, on the other, of persistent
speculations concerning the totality of which they should have been a
part, and from which they are supposed to have been rudely severed, for
reasons ranging from the murderous calculations involving the
precursors death to the utterly chancy event of the author's own
literal death. With the arrest of death, however, the fragments acquire a
peculiar life or afterlife of their own, at once demanding and resisting
conjectures about the completion of the teleological movement that has
been suspended. By the paradoxical logic of the seductive resistance, they
are open to surmises about which they remain stubbornly silent. In order
to resist such a seduction, it is therefore necessary to stay content with
the entirety of what is literally said. Such a totality is not a second
best, for it is
the
totality that escaped us in our expectation of
an encounter with totality.
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| 8. |
In Keatss
Hyperion:
A Fragment
and
The Fall of Hyperion: ADream
, success or failure
of reading has catastrophic consequences: they are doomed to fall who fail
to read as their successors do. The fall of the Titan is prefigured by the
unreadability of the signs of the sun, the hieroglyphics old: the
glancing spheres, / Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure (
H
:
1.273-77). With their meaning lost, the signs become once again mere
inscriptions, unrecognizable traces of circles and semi-circles. As the
signifiers and signifieds fall apart, Hyperion loses his power to make the
sun run, and his operations of the dawn (
H
: 1.294) end up in
a stillbirth. Fallen, Saturn fails to find the cause of his fall in the
old spirit-leaved book, which once served as his firm-based
footstool or the fundament of his reign. Study as he may, his deep
reading in Natures universal scroll finds nothing but the
sign, symbol, or portent / Of element, earth, water, air, and fire
at war with each other, a quadruple wrath [that] / Unhinges the poor
world (
H
: 2.133-51). Instead of the fall itself, which is
ultimately unreadable, we are given the cause and effect of the fall. A
poor reader, Hyperion is heading for the fall that turns Saturn into a
poor reader. They fall because they forget how to read, and as a result of
the fall they forget how to read. Circularity seems to be the fate of
reading, whose decree even the gods must obey. They fall because they fail
to make sense of the figure reading makes: the circle, which is also the
proper figure for revolution and, according to Jacques Derrida, the
rhythm of a sun's course.
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| 9. |
On the other hand,
Apollos apotheosis is predicated on his skill of reading the
unreadable, the silent face of memory. For the Father of all verse (
H
:
3.13), the crowning moment involves a scene of instruction, in which
Mnemosyne teaches what he knew but forgot. Before the intervention of
Mnemosyne, Apollo has already acquired certain aspects of the fallen
Saturn or Hyperion. Plagued by a dark, dark, / And painful vile
oblivion, he tries to overcome the loss until a melancholy numbs my
limbs; / And then upon the grass I sit, and moan, / Like one who once had
wings (
H
: 3.86-91). The restoration of memory takes the work of
mourning, which he entreats Mnemosyne to perform by apostrophizing her
harp that waileth every morn and eventide (
H
: 3.108-09).
Before getting a response from Mnemosyne, he proceeds to read / A
wondrous lesson in [her] silent face, from which he incorporates a body
of potent knowledge, as if some blithe wine / Or bright elixir peerless
I had drunk (
H
: 3.111-119). With the act of apostrophe, mourning
and memory are orally incorporated. But in order that mourning or an
invocation of mourning can restore memory, the latter has to be given a
face to begin with. Apostrophe and prosopopeia work in tandem. Reading
memory's face begins by giving memory a face, by which one re-members what
one knows all along.
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| 10. |
By the same token, the
poet-dreamers deification in
The Fall of Hyperion
is contingent
on reading the wan face (
F
: 1.256) of the relatively
humanized Moneta. Relatively, because hers is a visage deathwards
progressing / To no death (
F
: 1.260-61). Unlike the way Apollo
reads Mnemosynes silent face, however, the poet-dreamer reads
Monetas as a face that not only speaks but, more importantly, reads.
With eyes visionless entire . . . / Of external things (
F
:
1.267-68), what that face reads turns out to be the fragments of a
decaying-but-never-to-decay text called
Hyperion: A Fragment
. The
text, in other words, is dis-membered, only to be re-membered by the
warm scribe my hand (
F
: 1.18) and transcribed onto the cold
face of Moneta, who, by her power of translation, is inscribed as an ideal
interpreter within the text called
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream
.
As a mortal-immortal translator, she renders the unreadable of the
natural-supernatural into human speech:
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| 11. |
The warm scribes
translation of Monetas translation, however, is not meant for the
pedestrian or literal-minded readers. It prescribes a special order of
reading or viewing: vision, dream, or dream-vision. Properly speaking, the
text is presented as a script for performance in the theater, as evinced
by such dramaturgical imagery as rehearse (
F
: 1.16),
scenes (
F
: 1.244), acting (
F
: 1.279), and even
the slant reference to Shakespeares theater in the phrase globed
brain (
F
: 1.245). One also recalls the host of phantoms in the
first book of
H
which are compared to the crowd in a theater
(253-56). But Keats's is posited as literally a mental theater or a
theater of memory, for the scenes as narrated in
F
are said to be
enwombed behind the hollow brain (
F
: 1.276-77) of
Moneta. It therefore demands to be read with the minds eye or,
literally, an eye that sees into the mind or brain of the goddess of
memory. Given the predominance of the scopic imagery in
F
, Keats's
revision of
H
seems to represent an attempt to consign it to memory
for endless rehearsal and immediate re-presentation. All it takes to
see as a God sees (
F
: 1.304) is to invoke Moneta as Shade of
Memory (
F
: 1.282). When Keats dreams, he dreams himself not only
waking, but also seeing. Whats more, he not only sees himself seeing,
but sees himself reading and writing, rereading and rewriting the
text/script of
Hyperion
. Such is the vertigo of re-vision triggered
by the "Antichamber of the dream" in
F
(1.1-293).
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| 12. |
In providing a frame
for
H
, moreover, the antichamber also creates a fold in
F
that encloses not only
H
but
F
itself as well. At stake here
is the disparity between the narrative structure and the chronological
order of the events contained in the two fragments. Let me briefly retrace
the chronological sequence of the events in
H
and
F
. In the
beginning, according to Oceanus account (
H
: 2.190-231), there
were Chaos and parental Darkness, who gave birth to Light. Then
Light, engendering / Upon its own producer, brought forth Heaven and
Earth, parents of the Titans. As the Titans are overthrown by their
offspring, so will the Olympians, according to the law invoked by Oceanus,
be driven by another race to mourn their lot. In
F
, the
Olympians too have fallen, as indicated by the poet-dreamers apostrophe
that calls on the faded, far flown Apollo to punish the mock
lyrists, large self worshipers, / And careless Hectorers in proud bad
verse (1.204-08). It is open to speculation who displaces the Olympians
or whom the mock lyrists and careless Hectorers supplant. But it is
certain that, at the end of the line is the visionary company of one, the
poet-dreamer, who alone acquires the power to see as a God sees. Yet
this thematic and linear model, which also informs most political readings
of the two fragments, is profoundly at odds with the peculiar temporal and
narrative structure of the two fragments. As the antechamber folds the
chronological sequence back upon itself, so does the poet-dreamer at the
end of the line start the sequence all over again. Thus, the temporal and
narrative movement is circular, capable of infinitely repeating itself on
the one hand and creating a sense of no ending on the other.
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| 13. |
To put it
schematically, we can also trace the circular movement in the chiasmatic
relationship between the titles and the endings of the two fragments. On
the one hand,
H
actually deals with the fall of the Titan and ends
with the ascent of Apollo. On the other hand, the newly deified
poet-dreamer bears witness as Hyperion rushes and flares on at the end of
F
.
In
H
, Hyperion falls because, like Saturn, he falls victim to what
Jacques Lacan calls formal fixation
{22}
: he stands like the bulk / Of
Memnon's image at the set of sun (
H
: 3.373-74). In
F
,
however, he resumes the heat of action, rushing and flaring on. With the
two endings crossing each other out, circularity occurs in which Hyperion
falls and rises again, only to fall and rise again, and so on and so
forth.
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| 14. |
But then again,
everything returns eternally in the two fragments, including revolution
and the catalyst of revolution: Mnemosyne, Moneta, forever mourning. The
return of memory, however, is not the return of the same. Memory returns
as memory-traces, to be retroactively given a face so as to become
legible. Reading as revolution involves the abrupt transition from
assuming to assumption of meaning. Facing the goddesses of memory, both
the Father of all verse -- namely, Apollo -- and the poet-dreamer begin
their reading with guesses, surmises, fathomings, and probings. Strong
readers both, they know how to invoke memory to anticipate knowledge at
the slightest hint, be it the mute face of Mnemosyne or the very first
sentence of Moneta's story. With meaning won, they immediately proclaim
their title to godhead. The precipitation of meaning, moreover, involves
not only textual but also sexual violence. Whereas Apollo quivers into his
new identity, the poet-dreamer performs autopsy or biopsy on Moneta to see
the things inside the dark secret Chambers of her skull (
F
:
1.278). Such is the constitutive origin that a successful reading
revolution must forget, in order to achieve the identity of authority and
legitimacy. But Keats shows his hand, because he tries to remember. His
lesson, then, is Oceanus eternal law in an inverted form: the first in
might should be the first in beauty. And his construction of the
antichamber, which has the effect of containing the whole house of
revolutions, will deconstruct the edifice from within. In trying to
remember his revolution, it becomes a failed revolution that is capable of
endless circulation.
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| 15. |
Oceanus forgetting
revolution, on the other hand, is so successful, so winning, that it
seduces critics into identificatory readings. This can perhaps exemplify
the persuasive power of Oceanus' proof (
H
: 2.177), which
draws on the authority of Natures law (
H
: 2.181), the
eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might. An
ideologue who aestheticizes politics, he seeks to literally naturalize
power transitions. The truth, as Enceladus has pointed out twice, is that
he forgets his defeat by Neptune (
H
: 2.317-319). Rebuked and
humiliated, he is still capable of feeling of revenge. But this is a fact
that the critics tend to forget.
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Notes
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