Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing

206 Pages·2018·1.65 MB·English

by  Philip Dickinson (auth.)

Romanticism
and Aesthetic Life
in Postcolonial Writing
P h i l i p D i c k i n s o n
Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial
Writing
Philip Dickinson
Romanticism and
Aesthetic Life in
Postcolonial Writing
Philip Dickinson
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-70340-4 ISBN 978-3-319-70341-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70341-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961008
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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A
cknowledgements
This book began life as a doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto, and
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Ato Quayson,
and to my supervisory committee members, Sara Salih and Victor Li. I
also owe an immeasurable debt to other formal and informal mentors,
interlocutors, and friends, old and new: Ian Baucom, Shelagh Frawley,
Michaela Henry, Margaret Herrick, John McLeod, Ankhi Mukherjee,
Miriam Novick, Alexandra Rahr, Jay Rajiva, Kiyofumi Sigiura, Stephen
Slemon, Paul Stevens, Camille van der Marel, Jennifer Wenzel, and Auden
Witter. Special thanks to Jeff Morrissey for years of intellectual friendship,
to Sam Durrant for energizing support at such an early stage of my career
and for ongoing comradeship, to Shan and Jay Sullaphen, and to Sue,
Vijay and Yavani Singh, for forming such a generous extended family-
from- home over the long gestation of this book. Special and deep thanks
to Nama and Robert Walther, to Mum and Dad, to Catherine and Louise,
and to Carys, Henry and Benjamin. And thanks, if I could contain my
gratitude in that word, to Sunny, and to the little person with whom we
now share our lives, Djuna. I lost my brother, Andrew, at the end of my
doctoral studies, and I dedicate this very humble thing to him.
This project was completed with funding from the University of
Toronto, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
Some of the material from Chap. 3 has appeared in a different form in
an essay in ariel, and an earlier version of the reading of Coetzee from the
final countervoice appears in an essay in Mosaic.
v
c
ontents
Chapter 1: Romanticism and Postcolonial Writing: Living
Thoughts, Breathing Worlds 1
Chapter 2: Walcott, Wordsworth, and the Extinction
of Sense 29
Countervoice I: George Lamming 60
Chapter 3: Dis-Enclosure: Landscape, Lyric Form,
and The Enigma of Arrival 75
Countervoice II: Anita Desai 107
Chapter 4 : White Writing and the Regime of the Sensory 125
Countervoice III: J. M. Coetzee 141
Chapter 5: Spivak’s Imagination 163
vii
viii CONTENTS
Bibliography 185
Index 195
Chapter 1: Romanticism and Postcolonial
Writing: Living Thoughts, Breathing Worlds
‘From a bare ridge,’ he reads aloud,
we also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.
—J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
In order to return to [the things themselves], it is necessary first to see
them, therefore to see them as they come and, in the end, to bear their
unpredictable landing.
—Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of
Givenness
The experiment has only started which, clearing the mind for the shock
of life, would in time overcome every arbitrary god of the intellect, thus
to achieve a perfect induction and a faultless faith.
—Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision
I decompose, but I composing still.
—Derek Walcott, ‘The Spoiler’s Return’
The familiar postcolonial literary antagonism towards the aesthetic dis-
courses of empire finds a corollary in the critique of Romantic ideology
undertaken within Romantic criticism in recent decades: in both cases, the
project of critique has had difficulty escaping the object of critique. Jerome
McGann sought not only to demystify Romanticism’s strategies of
© The Author(s) 2018 1
P. Dickinson, Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70341-1_1
2 P. DICKINSON
aesthetic and political evasion, but also to reform Romantic criticism and
its compromising investment in these strategies. But according to later
critics, McGann’s endeavour was paradoxical and even contradictory: his
effort to return poetry to a ‘human form’ is as Romantic as it gets,1 a neo-
Wordsworthian imperative that surely must itself be demystified.2 Clifford
Siskin subsequently offered such a demystification, as he sought, contra
McGann and others, to write a literary history of Romanticism rather than
a Romantic literary history.3 But Siskin too, in his critique of the ‘lyric
turn’ by which Romantic texts evade their generic grounding and historic-
ity, assumes too readily that the power of lyrical truth procedures can be
effectively resisted. Siskin develops a systematic approach that would resist
the allure of the lyrical redefinition of the real, with its psychologizing,
developmentalist biases, but, as Ed Larrissy has suggested, it may be
impossible for language to escape a lyric turn: there is, after all, no meta-
language, no escape from metaphor.4 The point is that even the practice of
demystification itself—of substituting reality for a conventional, generic
delusion—can, through a shift of perspective, appear as a version of this
same lyrical move.
Romanticism has a kind of insistence. As Marc Redfield claims, an
aesthetic discourse of Romanticism appears to recur ‘in denouncing
itself’.5 There is no guarantee that a heightened critical vigilance is suf-
ficient to leave the aesthetic discourse of Romanticism firmly behind.6
Romantic criticism may unknowingly extend supposedly definitive fea-
tures of Romanticism as it agitates against Romantic ideology, resurrect-
ing the belief in a universal human poetry (McGann), or reanimating the
faith that a reformed language can capture the truth of things (Siskin). If
this insistence operates in exactly the space that most vigilantly guards
against it, then it surely also appears in the wider literary and cultural
field. As Marjorie Perloff writes in a provocative reading of a late twenti-
eth-century poetics, even an ostensibly marginalized voice may uncriti-
cally inscribe itself through lyric tropes, with the ‘tacit assumption that
the lyric is a univocal and authentic form of self-expression’.7 But if
Romanticism appears here as a power that recaptures the critic (or poet)
at every instant she thinks she has escaped its embrace, the opposite phe-
nomenon is also true, where a critical desire to have Romanticism live on
shapes readings of its persistence. Romanticism, therefore, sustains the
imagination of virtual reality; it informs the orientation of contemporary
theory; it undergirds, or is simply is, the counterdiscourse to modernity
since the eighteenth century.8
ROMANTICISM AND POSTCOLONIAL WRITING: LIVING… 3
Who can deny that Romanticism lives on, and yet how can this ‘living
on’ accrue any meaningful coherence if such a range of phenomena,
reflecting such a diversity of aesthetic and cultural perspectives, are part of
this persistence? It is perhaps true, as Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle sug-
gest, that the long-standing interest within Romantic studies of
Romanticism’s persistence is itself a form of that persistence,9 but perhaps
no more true than the idea that Romanticism enjoys a substantial afterlife,
its aesthetic ideology continuing to infect our critical orientations, its sub-
versive potential continuing to reopen productive fractures in our senses
of history. Here, we undoubtedly confront the metaphorical nature of the
Romantic period: to speak of Romanticism is to speak of something sup-
plementary to it, to give a historical name to a critical preoccupation that
may have no necessary relationship with Romantic-period cultural prod-
ucts. The problem is surely amplified if we introduce another equally con-
tested period term, as I am doing: the postcolonial.10 As literary-historical
periodizations, the terms share the fact that they do not speak to non-
controversial historical units (like the eighteenth or twentieth centuries),
but are products of an active interpretive agency: the concept of the
Romantic period suggests that something happened at the end of the
eighteenth century, and the designation ‘postcolonial literature’ ascribes a
special historical significance to colonial and postcolonial history for an
impossibly diverse range of literary production. To approach the afterlives
of Romanticism in postcolonial writing is to redouble the difficulty it
seems, especially since these terms can signal not only historical and tran-
sregional provenance, but also genre, aesthetic mode and sensibility, his-
torical outlook, and the critic’s interpretive orientation.
This book can hardly claim to transcend this problem. In opening the
question of a relationship between postcolonial and Romantic-period
writing, I am implicated in the phenomenon that Cynthia Chase observed
in 1993, where there is ‘a specular or mirroring relation between
Romanticism and the present that one cannot be sure of controlling
through its conversion into a genetic narrative or history’.11 I therefore
propose no such conversion: it is not that British Romanticism—my focus
here—provides the secret origin of postcolonial aesthetics. Nor is it, in the
more familiar narrative in this context, that postcolonial writing arrays its
forces against a Romantic corpus easily collapsible into the aesthetic ideol-
ogy of empire. Instead, it is that postcolonial writing furnishes a series of
intertextual contact zones which, when threaded together, constitute, in
the proper sense of that word, an internally various Romantic afterlife.