Sole Author I, Sole cause

“Sole Author I, Sole cause”: Wordsworth and the Poetics of Importance 1 Megan Becker-Leckrone You make me strange Even to the disposition that I owe. —William Shakespeare, Macbeth, III. iv. 111–12 In The End of the Line, Neil Hertz describes a characteristic moment of crisis, what he calls “blockage,” in Immanuel Kant’s idealist aesthetic: “There is, according to Kant, a sense of the sublime—he calls it the mathematical sublime—arising out of sheer cognitive exhaustion, the mind blocked not by the threat of an overwhelming force, but by the fear of losing count or of being reduced to nothing but counting—this and this and this—with no hope of bringing a long series or a vast scattering under some sort of conceptual unity.” 2 Hertz’s concern in the chapter headed by this description is to survey the ways in which the scenario of “sheer cognitive exhaustion” plays itself out with peculiar regularity in both eighteenth-century theories of sublimity and twentieth-century commentaries on them. To perform this survey, however, he also makes two companion readings which frame his central subject—one of the current status of the critic in the field of criticism, and one of Book VII of Wordsworth’s Prelude. The first examination looks at an “omnibus review” from a “recent issue of Studies in English Literature,” the rhetoric of which gives Hertz the rich opportunity of pointing out that, not only theoretically but also practically, scholars are all too well acquainted with the force of the mathematical sublime (41). 3 The reviewer’s momentary balk at [End Page 993] “the flood of publication [which] threaten[s] the very knowledge that publication purports to serve”—a threat he effectively overcomes in the capable survey of nineteenth-century studies which follows—represents for Hertz a “blockage” inherent in the critical enterprise as we engage in it today (41). “Professional explainers of literature,” he notes, “have only to try to locate themselves in the current intellectual scene, to try to determine what is to be learned from the linguists or the philosophers or the psychoanalysts or the political economists, in order to experience the requisite mental overload and even that momentary checking of the vital powers” (40). Hertz, however, is not too seriously committed to his paraphrase. Ultimately, he distances himself from the reviewer’s dire tone, interested rather in the “embodiment of a threat” the “grimly comic” scenario invokes, for it is, he argues, “a familiar one to readers of Wordsworth, who repeatedly represents himself as, in his phrasing, ‘thwarted, baffled and rescued in his own despite’“ (44). This thematic kinship brings him to the second examination, which connects the predicament of these “[p]rofessional explainers” with Wordsworth’s in the blind beggar episode of The Prelude, Book VII, the book that details the nature poet’s experience in the teeming urban space of London. The vast city poses a direct threat to the mind of the poet, a threat Wordsworth identifies in encapsulated form at Bartholomew Fair near the end of the chapter: O, blank confusion and a type not false Of what the mighty City is itself To all, except a straggler here and there— To the whole swarm of its inhabitants— An undistinguishable world to men, The slaves unrespited of low pursuits, Living amid the same perpetual flow Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end— Oppression, under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. (696–707) Because of the pivotal role it plays in helping Wordsworth labor under the “Oppression” of London’s “blank confusion,” Hertz identifies the episode as exceptional, as many other critics do. Wordsworth’s poem, in order to have meaning itself, must answer both to the “accumulating overload of urban detail” and to the crisis of differentiation [End Page 994] and signification—of reading—it precipitates (58). “[I]t is in response to them,” he hypothesizes, “that the Blind Beggar is brought into the poem” (59). This figure, in the “fixity” of his blank face and the story upon his chest, “reestablishes boundaries between representor and represented

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Literature · Nothing · Poetics · Poetry · Rhetoric · Subject (documents) · Sublime · Theology · Computer Science · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy

• Peripatetic in the City

  Open Access•Emily B Stanback•Literature Compass•2013

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• Wordsworth's Disgrace

  Open Access•Pieter Vermeulen•Journal of Literary Studies•2007

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