Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment

280 Pages·2015·0.82 MB·English

by  Anahid Nersessian

Utopia, Limited

UTOPIA,
L I M I T E D
Romanticism and Adjustment

A N A H I D N E R SE S SI A N
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nersessian, Anahid, 1982–
Utopia, limited : romanticism and adjustment / Anahid Neressian.
pages cm
Includes biblographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-43457-8 (alk. paper)
1. Utopias in literature. 2. Utopias—Philosophy. 3. Romanticism. I. Title.
PN56.U8N47 2015
809'.93372—dc23
2014028423
Contents
Prologue 1
1 Rcsm, an Introduction 14
2 Worldfeel from Kant to Wordsworth 43
3 Losing Ground in Shelley’s Revolt 75
4 Bad Taste, or Varieties of Empire and Anticolonialism 110
5 Hazlitt’s Disappointment 142
6 Narrating Capital, Reading Rcsm 172
Notes 209
Acknowledgments 259
Index 261

Prologue
“Paulò majora canamus.”
—Vergil, Eclogue IV, quoted in William Wordsworth,
“Ode (‘There was a time’),” 1807
FROM THE MYTHOLOGICAL past of Hesiod’s Golden Age to the future-
anterior earths of science fi ction, images of utopia—or the perfect world—
both precede and postdate Romanticism. In fact Romanticism, being in
Barbara Johnson’s words “postrevolutionary but preatomic,” seems rather to
favor apocalypse over utopia.1 By the time Mary Shelley’s extinction novel
The Last Man was published in 1826, it was greeted by the collective yawn
of a reading public for whom contemplating the end of the world had be-
come “absolutely common-place.”2 That said, while Shelley’s novel mani-
fests a Romantic preoccupation with “the strange temporality of the end of
man,” it would be equally fair to say that the novel joins in a more general
Romantic-era fascination with eschatology not always marked by anguish
or doom.3 The Unitarian minister Richard Price infuriated Edmund Burke
by hailing the French Revolution in the exultant idiom of the Canticle of
Simeon: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes
have seen thy salvation.” Another revolutionary, William Blake, wrote po-
ems punctuated by catastrophes that, inevitably, herald the wondrous reno-
vation of life as we know it.4 The conclusion of the Simplon Pass episode of
William Wordsworth’s Prelude turns similarly on a redemptive reckoning of
2 UTOPIA, LIMITED
the poet’s environment; “woods decaying, never to be decayed,/The station-
ary blasts of water-falls,” “winds thwarting winds,” “The torrents shooting
from the clear blue sky,/The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,” and
so on are counted “Characters of the great Apocalypse,/The types and sym-
bols of Eternity,/Of fi rst and last, and midst, and without end.”5 While the
world-ending cadences of The Last Man, of Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness,”
or of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfi nished, devastating The Triumph of Life are
decidedly downbeat, the propulsive joy of Blake’s prophecies or Wordsworth
at his most vivacious suggests that for some Romantic poets, the end of days
often coincides with the nascence of an earthly paradise. We might say, then,
that the term “Romanticism” designates a body of literature for which the
relationship between the world’s destruction and its regeneration is notice-
ably intensifi ed, so that as soon as a Romantic text “begin[s] speaking of the
end” it has already launched itself toward a description of the beginning.6
That is not the argument of this book. From the literature of what has
been called the Romantic Century, Utopia, Limited gleans elements of a
political and aesthetic paradigm that fetishizes neither apocalyptic ruin nor
its redemption.7 What it does do is reconstitute the perfect world as a place
where grief, loss, suffering, and habits of self-denial—all far from the surfeit
implied by the word “perfect”—become essential to the idea of utopia per se.
Ranging from 1750 to 1850, the notion of the Romantic century enables this
argument insofar as it allows Romanticism to tip forward into the Victorian
period while reaching backward to the Enlightenment and its origins—for
in order to understand how representations of bereavement, melancholy, or
deprivation might come to have positive charges and sometimes even plea-
surable effects for Romantic-era utopian discourse, we must take up a long
view of history trained upon the emergence of industrial modernity and its
post-industrial fate. Recent scholarship has shown Romanticism to coincide,
almost too neatly, with the dawning of an era some scientists are calling the
anthropocene, an era of nature’s end and of humankind’s hostile takeover of
earth’s thermostat.8 This book does not take too much time corroborating
a line of causation between ecological peril and Romantic literature, or be-
tween Romanticism and any particular cataclysmic event. Rather, the fact of
industrialization and its risks grounds a more abstract meditation on what I
describe as a Romantic attentiveness to precarity, specifi cally the precarity of
physical environments and material resources. Such attentiveness, I argue,
is the necessary precondition to elaborating the possibility of adjustment,
PROLOGUE 3
defi ned throughout as a formal as well as an ethical operation that allows
human beings to accommodate themselves to the world by minimizing the
demands they place upon it.
I should say that adjustment is defi ned here fi rst as a formal and sec-
ondarily as an ethical operation, since it is from Romantic practices of po-
etic composition that this book’s proposal for a utopian doing-with-less is
derived. Poiesis, the Greek word for making or shaping, entails loss, but
not necessarily of a kind that begs to be rendered in pained or melodra-
matic terms. On the contrary, Romanticism teaches that the abdication of
possibilities can furnish us with equanimity just as it can furnish us with
art. A sonnet disciplines itself into fourteen lines; speech is wrestled into
verse; at the end of Keats’s Hyperion, Apollo adapts to his new divinity as if
“struggl[ing] at the gate of death,/Or liker still to one who should take leave/
Of pale immortal death,” that initial struggle dissolving into the gentle and
genteel retirement of merely taking leave. If these transformations are to
some degree traumatic, they also cast trauma as an understated event of ac-
commodation to an external force that wounds but does not kill. This way
of interpreting poiesis cuts against more familiar takes on Romanticism as a
literature of extremes, whether those are pitched toward the nadir of Mary
Shelley’s tragic lastness or the lofty confi dence Price places in “salvation.”
It also cuts, I think, against a lately dominant “critical mood” that informs
and mirrors the “political pedagogy” of many contemporary left and radical
social movements.9 Written in solidarity with the aims of such movements,
and self-situated within a long tradition of Marxist literary criticism, Utopia,
Limited fi nds in the Romantic period a counter to a rhetoric of political desire
typifi ed by Judith Butler’s recent injunction to “demand the impossible.”10
While this phrasing of the utopian imperative offers to disrupt the conven-
tional wisdom of neoliberal modernity (namely, that late capitalism and its
legion of harms should not, indeed cannot be resisted, let alone defeated)
I suggest that both the heroic posture of “demand” and the stipulation of
its object as “the impossible” are unintentionally underwritten by a hazard-
ous metaphysical assumption: that, in Hegel’s words, “it is not the fi nite
which is the real, but rather the infi nite.”11 To be sure, Butler means to make
her “impossible” ironic, going on partly to defi ne “impossible demands”
pragmatically as “the right to shelter, food and employment” and the re-
quirement that those who profi t from economic rapacity “redistribute their
wealth and cease their greed.” Nonetheless, by reproducing impossibility