Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Robert J. Griffin

O'Neill's approach "centres on the aesthetic achievement signalled and made possible by poetic self-consciousness' (xxvii). But self-consciousness alone is not sufficient to indicate artistic achievement; it is not even enough to guarantee that one is dealing with literature. Let's briefly review a line of thinking that has been central to twentieth-century literary theory but may have been eclipsed in the recent vogue for antitheory polemics.

Roman Jakobson, in a widely influential article, "Linguistics and Poetics" (1960), described six different functions of language, one of which was the "poetic. "In the poetic functioning of language the focus of attention, Jakobson claimed, was language itself, and the effect was to promote an awareness of "the palpability of signs" and deepen the "fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects." By this definition of literariness Jakobson argued that the distinguishing feature of literary language was its self-reflexivity, its awareness of itself as a medium. Literature, then, by its very nature is reflexive. But the poetic function is only one of six. In literature it is dominant, but it may exist in other kinds of language as well where it will be subordinated to a different dominant function in a different hierarchical organization. This also means that the poetic function is not the only function of language in literature, leaving open the question of engagement with social or moral issues.

Following Jakobson but specifically citing the precedent of Monroe Beardsley, Paul de Man in "Semiology and Rhetoric" (1975) refined the argument to claim that literature was the place in which language was aware of itself as rhetoric, by which he meant figure. The implication de Man drew was that, at crucially important moments, literature was unreadable because figures were unstable and could not be reduced to the logicality of a grammar. The thickness of signs, Jakobson's "palpability," impeded the very process of meaning construction; this experience of frustration, in de Man's view, was not only inevitable but salutary because it brought the reader up short. What careful reading (in de Man's sense) led the reader to was self-awareness, an alertness to the imperial tendencies of the intellect to reduce to its own rule whatever it comes into contact with, or, in other words, to make the text a mirror of itself. Literature, it appears, is a veritable hall of mirrors.

When, very late in the game, O'Neill observes of Hyperion that "the medium occupies centre-stage" (225), the reader can legitimately ask, why only here? A similar sense of opportunities missed occurs when O'Neill discusses "Peele Castle," which of course is a meditation on Beaumont's painting: "Reference to an artwork in another medium allows Wordsworth to explore what he is (and should be) doing in the poem itself" (55). A consideration of ekphrasis (the word does not appear in this book) might have been useful. It might have led to a reading of Shelley's poem on Leonardo's Medusa with its brief but rich tradition of commentary. It might have organized a chapter around other instances. I do not mean to suggest that O'Neill should have written a book to my prescription. But I do want to register how unsatisfactory I find it as a reader to encounter a book on this topic which gives the impression of deriving its newly discovered insights from unmediated encounters with individual poems rather than engaging productively with what is already available in the critical tradition. The general impression this book leaves is of how much it refuses to take on board, how much it refuses to argue explicitly, how much it simply takes for granted.